MOSCOW, Feb. 11 - The Roman Catholic Church said today 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 just as the two faiths seemed to be edging toward a long-sought reconciliation.
In statements and on Italian television today, the Vatican characterized the move as an almost routine elevation of its Russian operations to the same status maintained by virtually every other Catholic presence 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.
Today'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 Pope John Paul II: to begin healing the thousand-year rift between Christianity's Eastern and Western branches by meeting the Orthodox patriarch, Aleksy II, in Moscow.
Aleksy's spokesman, the Rev. Vsevolod Chaplin, accused the Vatican on Russian television today of in effect abandoning 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.
As a practical matter, the Vatican's decision appeared to change little in how the Catholic Church in Russia serves its believers, estimated at 1.3 million. The church had divided the country into four so- called apostolic administrations, a temporary designation it had used in many Eastern European nations in the last century, when the Soviet Union suppressed religion.
Today's action replaces those administrations with ordinary dioceses, a move that already had occurred in Eastern Europe after Communism fell.
The four new dioceses will be based in Moscow, Saratov, Novosibirsk and Irkutsk, cities with concentrations of Catholics.
"With this measure, the existence of the Catholic Church in Russia acquires a dimension of normalcy under canon law," the pope's spokesman, Joaquín Navarro Valls, said today.
But the Russian Orthodox Church condemned the decision as "an unfriendly act" that violated canonical principles and ignored the requirements of ecclesiastical diplomacy.
"Such issues should be a topic for discussion between the churches and should not be implemented unilaterally," a spokesman for the Orthodox Church, Igor Vyzhanov, told the Russian news agency Interfax.
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. The Vatican says its converts come from the millions of Russians who held no firm religious beliefs under Communism.
"We do not accept the term canonical territory," Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, the Catholics' senior official in Russia, said in an interview today. In any case, he said, the Catholic Church had maintained dioceses in Russia as recently as the 18th century, giving today's announcement historical precedent.
Pope John Paul has visited virtually every former Soviet state except Russia, and President Vladimir V. Putin had invited him to visit Moscow. But the Orthodox Church said in January that no visit would be possible until the two churches had settled their canonical disputes.