On a gentle bend in the Pskova River, near the center of this city steeped in religious history, the skeletal brick walls of a new cathedral rise unfinished, shrouded in wooden scaffolding and mired in the deepening tensions between the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches.
Pskov's small group of Roman Catholics began building the church two years ago, but the regional government unexpectedly halted construction in April, citing discrepancies in its blueprints and other documents.
Although officials have described the problem as purely a technical one, their decision came a month after Pskov's Orthodox leader, Archbishop Yevsevy, wrote to local leaders and President Vladimir V. Putin protesting the Catholic Church's "aggression" and "expansionist goals" in Russia.
"Taking advantage of the fruits of our current democracy, the enemies of our state are preparing a new expansion of Catholicism, which on the territory of Russia always resulted in war," the archbishop wrote.
Work at the church, which stopped five months ago, still has not resumed.
The conflict in Pskov — a city, near the border with Estonia, that is one of Russia's oldest — mirrors a worsening rift between the Orthodox and Catholic faiths, even as it raises questions about the limits on religious freedoms in Mr. Putin's Russia.
Russia's post-Soviet Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, and Mr. Putin has spoken in strikingly personal terms about the role religious beliefs play in Russian society.
"I've become increasingly convinced that now that we have no work collectives or party organizations, such as those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or educators at places of work, nothing but religion can make human values known to people," Mr. Putin said in an address to the World Tatar Congress in Kazan in late August.
He also said government officials should "do our best to prevent the building of barriers between them and their citizens."
But adherents of minority faiths in Russia — Catholics, Protestants, Muslims — say building barriers is exactly what government officials have done, increasingly at the behest of the Orthodox Church.
For Russia's Catholics, perhaps 600,000 in all, the trend has only worsened since a Vatican decision in February to transform its four apostolic administrative divisions in Russia into traditional dioceses.
The decision infuriated the Orthodox Church, which said it amounted to an infringement on its historical and spiritual territory. That began a spiral of mutual recriminations that has swept up smaller communities like the one in Pskov and dashed hopes of reconciliation between the two faiths, a goal of Pope John Paul II.
In April, the airport police in Moscow stripped the visa from one of Russia's four bishops, the Rev. Jerzy Mazur, a native of Poland. Since then, the Russian authorities revoked residency visas of an Italian priest, the Rev. Stefano Caprio, and just last month, a priest from Slovakia, the Rev. Stanislav Krajniak.
[On Monday, a fourth priest, the Rev. Jaroslaw Wiszniewski, a native of Poland, was detained at the airport in Khaborovsk, in Russia's Far East, as he returned from a trip to Japan. The Interfax news agency reported that he would be expelled.]
Catholic leaders say the visa decisions have deprived parishes of their spiritual leaders. There are only about 300 Catholic priests in Russia today, many of them foreigners susceptible to the vagaries of Russia's visa practices.
In May, the pope wrote to Mr. Putin about Bishop Mazur's position in particular. Mr. Putin responded last month. Officials from both sides have not disclosed the contents, but a spokesman for the Catholic Church in Moscow, Viktor Khrul, said Mr. Putin's letter had not directly addressed the effective expulsion of Bishop Mazur or other priests.
"The situation is not very pleasant, because the authorities have found our Achilles' heel," Mr. Khrul said. "They can deprive us of our clergy, because most of them are foreigners. And they can deny them visas without giving any reason."
In Pskov, as in many other Russian cities, the tensions between the churches have rarely been manifested in violence, as has been the case in other republics of the former Soviet Union. Most often, bureaucracy dogs the Catholics.
In some regions, Catholic congregations have not been allowed to register officially as religious organizations, as required by a 1997 law. Two of the four new dioceses, in Irkutsk and Saratov, have also been denied official recognition so far.
In Pskov's case, the ostensible genesis of the conflict was the height of the new church, but the wrangling has come to involve the church's place and mission in a historic center of Russian Orthodoxy.
While Orthodox leaders often accuse the Roman Catholic Church of being a newcomer to Russia, its presence in Pskov dates to 1803. Like all faiths, the Catholic Church was severely repressed during the Soviet era, ceasing altogether in Pskov in 1933. Its old church, built in 1843, was seized, and is now a vocational school. Pskov officials have repeatedly refused to return it to the Catholics.
The Rev. Vladimir Timoshenko, one of Pskov's two Catholic priests, showed 19th-century photographs of the old church as if to validate the church's historical claims.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the church re-established its presence in Pskov and began administering to the few hundred Catholic faithful who remained or rediscovered their spirituality.
Since 1994, Mass has been celebrated daily inside a chapel fashioned out of a converted garage in a pink stucco house. The chapel has two rows of plank pews with room for no more than two dozen worshipers. On Sundays, Father Timoshenko opens the garage doors, and the congregation spills onto the driveway.
Hence the need for the new church.
Construction on the church and an adjoining chancellery began in 2000 and continued until February. After Orthodox officials began complaining, inspectors found fault in the design, including the height of the church's towers, which had been planned to reach nearly 115 feet. The church has since lowered the height to 91 feet, but is still awaiting approval to proceed.
Since the building stopped, Orthodox officials have complained about the church, and twice groups of Orthodox believers have staged protests. "I want this church to serve all Christians," Father Vladimir said. "In the past, our churches were united. I want them to be united again, but this path is full of tortures."
The Rev. Ioann Mukhanov, the Orthodox priest at Holy Trinity Cathedral here and the secretary of the diocese council, denied that there were tensions with the Catholics but acknowledged that church officials had registered protests with the local authorities to halt construction.
He then listed a series of grievances against the new church — from its size to its name, which is also to be Holy Trinity — and against the Catholic presence in Russia generally. Echoing complaints from Orthodox officials across Russia, he accused the Catholic Church of proselytizing, seeking converts among orphans, among others.
"It's obvious," he said, "that they are planning to interfere with children of our Orthodox families."
Not all among the Orthodox clerics are so adamant. The Rev. Andrei Davydov, the priest at the Cathedral of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist and a renowned iconographer, has offered to paint the altar of the new Catholic Church.
"All these frictions are mixed with politics," Father Andrei said as he interrupted work on a new fresco in his church, built in the 12th century. "On both sides, it's not as simple as it seems. It's very old, and it cannot be settled overnight."