MOSCOW -- The Roman Catholic Church said Monday that it had upgraded its presence in Russia by carving the nation into four new dioceses, drawing a quick and bitter rebuke from the Russian Orthodox Church, which threatened to sever all contacts just as the two faiths seemed to be edging toward a long-sought reconciliation.
In statements and on Italian television, the Vatican characterized the move as an almost routine elevation of its Russian operations to the same status maintained by virtually every other Catholic community worldwide. Technically, at least, that was correct.
But in a diplomatic sense, the decision plunged one of the ecclesiastical world's icier relationships into an even deeper freeze.
The conservative and sometimes nationalistic Russian Orthodox Church has often accused the Vatican of trying to pilfer its ranks for converts to Roman Catholicism.
Monday's decision, which formalized the Catholic Church's somewhat ad hoc presence in Russia, reinforced that suspicion among Orthodox officials. It almost certainly set back one of the fondest hopes of 81-year-old Pope John Paul II: to begin healing the thousand-year rift between Christianity's Eastern and Western branches by meeting with the Orthodox patriarch, Alexy II, in Moscow.
Alexy's spokesman, Vsevolod Chaplin, accused the Vatican on Russian television of, in effect, abandoning what he called a moderate presence inside Russia in favor of establishing an alternative church.
"Our attitude toward this step is the same as the Catholics' if we were to appoint an alternative pope in Rome," he said.
"All contacts between the Orthodox Church and the Vatican will likely be stopped" for an indefinite time, "because we have nothing to talk about," the Russian church's chief of foreign relations, Metropolitan Kirill, said on Russia's RTR television.
The four new dioceses will be based in Moscow, Saratov, Novosibirsk and Irkutsk, cities with historically large concentrations of Catholics. The Orthodox Church essentially recognizes the Catholic Church's right to minister to the population of believers. But the number of Catholics has been growing in Russia in recent years, and Orthodox officials say the converts are coming, in essence, from their territory.
Their obvious fears for the church's future are not entirely unjustified. Though Orthodoxy is by far the dominant religion in Russia, religion as a whole remains a weak force, and scores of competing churches have moved onto Russian soil seeking converts.
For its part, the Vatican says its converts come from the millions of Russians who held no firm religious beliefs under Communism.