religions, the Lutheran Church was organized as a department within the Depart-
ment of Spiritual Affairs in the Ministry of Interior (1832). An empire-wide secular
administration was created withfive consistories, three in the Baltic territories and
in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which divided authority over urban and Volga
Lutherans. These consistories were in turn divided into bishoprics and groups of
parishes; Lutheran schools endured under this structure.
CATHOLICISM
Catholicism was the dominant religion of ethnic Poles in the Commonwealth of
Poland-Lithuania; already in the 1760s Russia was formulating a policy of official
interaction with Catholicism in the empire (then primarily in the Baltic provinces)
to fend off interference by King Stanislas-Augustus Poniatowski of Poland and
Austrian Empress Maria Theresa on behalf of their Catholic co-religionists. By
those early policies Catherine II allowed Catholic parishes to maintain their
property and worship, but asserted notable restrictions. As with all non-Orthodox
religions in the empire, the state forbade Catholics to proselytize, and quite
radically it refused to allow papal oversight of the Catholic community in anything
but theology. It did not allow Catholic bishoprics in the Russian empire, refused to
promulgate papal bulls, and in 1766 replaced Vatican oversight of Catholic parishes
with the supervision of the Justice College of Livland, Estland, and Finnish affairs,
which also administered the Baltic Lutheran population. In 1769 the state
enhanced oversight by issuing guidelines for Catholic parishes regarding property,
administration, andfinances and by establishing a Roman Catholic bishopric for
the Russian empire, to be appointed (against Vatican protest) by the Empress. After
thefirst partition of Poland this Roman Catholic bishop was appointed in 1773 in
Mohylev in Grand Duchy lands to serve the empire’s newly expanded Catholic
community; by the 1780s Catherine had forced the Papacy to accept the see’s
promotion to an archbishopric, which took over administration of the empire’s
Catholics (including Uniates) from the Baltic College. After thefinal partitions of
Poland (1793, 1795) Roman Catholics and Uniates amounted to about 14 percent
of the empire’s population. Paul I maintained relative tolerance for Catholics,
creating a department of Roman Catholic affairs in the Justice College, which
was transformed into the Roman Catholic Ecclesiastical College in 1801 to oversee
Catholics and Uniates.
JUDAISM
The greatest centers of Jewish learning, education, cultural expression, and creativ-
ity in the world in the early modern period were in the Polish-Lithuanian Com-
monwealth in lands that came into the Russian empire in the late eighteenth
century. As noted in Chapter 5, the sixteenth century was a high point of Ashken-
azic Talmudic learning. Although like Christianity Judaism is fundamentally
404 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801