Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul (Tula)

The Catholic community in the Tula region has existed since the 19th century. As far back as the 1840s, there was a chaplain of the Moscow Railway, who fed the Tula Catholics ^[1] . After the suppression of the 1863 uprising, a large number of Catholic exiles arrived in Tula from the territories of modern Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. V. I. Smidovich, the synod of the church council of the Catholic parish of Tula, was a well-known physician, founder of the Tula city hospital and city sanitary commission, one of the founders of the Society of Tula doctors. His son was also a doctor and famous writer V.V. Veresaev ^[1] .

In 1885, the Catholics of Tula opened a chapel in a private house with the permission of the authorities, but it could not accommodate all the believers, and the leadership of the parish appealed to various authorities with a request to allocate land for the construction of the temple. On May 28, 1893, permission was received from the Department of Spiritual Affairs for Foreign Religions to build a church on the outskirts of Tula near Kievskaya Street .

The laying of the temple took place on May 15, 1894 at the intersection of Kievskaya (now Lenin Ave.) and Motyakinskaya (now L. Tolstoy) streets. The construction was led by the provincial architect Evarist Skavronsky (1846-1909). The consecration of the temple took place in 1896, it was held by the vicar general of the Mogilev Metropolis Francis Simon .

Since 1898, a permanent priest worked in the parish. The life of the parish became more active - a library was opened at the church, and performances were organized for Catholic holidays. According to the census of 1897, 1224 Catholics lived in the Tula province (most of them in Tula) ^[1]

After 1917, the number of parishioners fell sharply. This was due to the great emigration of Poles and Balts to their homeland due to the coming to power of the Bolsheviks. In 1918, according to the adopted decree, all the property of the temple became public property, however, the temple operated for some time. In 1926, the rector of the church, Fr. Y. Pavlovich was arrested, and in 1932 the temple was finally closed. Later, at different times, the editorial office of the newspaper Young Communard and the forensic laboratory were located there.

In 1993, the Catholic community of Tula was revived, but the temple was still at the disposal of another organization. In 1995, the community, for the Mass, was allocated a garage attached to the temple. Until March 30, 2004, when the church was officially donated to the parish, masses were celebrated in this garage.

The return of the temple was facilitated by the appeals of the Apostolic Nuncio in the Russian Federation, Antonio Mennini, and the position of the Archbishop of Tula and Belevsky Alexy , who responded to a request from the authorities that he was not against the transfer of the temple and saw this as a manifestation of justice. After obtaining the relevant permits in 2006, restoration work began in the temple, which ended in 2007.

On December 23, 2007, the grand opening of the temple took place ^[2] . On July 6, 2008, Archbishop Metropolitan Paolo Pezzi consecrated the restored church. ^[3] During the consecration, particles of the relics of St. John Bosco , the blessed Tselina Bozhentskaya and St. Elizabeth were placed in the altar of the temple. On June 17, 2012, the new digital organ of the Italian company Viscount was transferred to the temple, and on September 30 the first organ concert was held in Tula. ^[four]

The Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul was built in the pseudo-Gothic style of red brick. The authors of the project are provincial architect Evarist Skavronsky. Above the main entrance is a tall spire with two side towers. Earlier, at the entrance to the temple, statues of the Apostles Peter and Paul, lost in Soviet times, were installed on the right and left sides. In the niche of the spire previously housed a small statue of the Virgin Mary, also now lost. Photos of the original interior of the temple were not preserved, and during the reconstruction of the building in 2006-2007, the interior of the temple was made in a modern style, different from the style of pseudo-Gothic.

• about. Zygmunt Lozinsky
• about. Janusz Moroz (1994-1996)
• about. Grigory Pyurkovsky (1996-1997)
• about. Henrik Lewandowski (2004-2007)
• about. Peter Fidermack (2007-2008)
• about. Rafal Kravchik (2008—2011)
• about. Vitaly Spitsyn (2011—2017) ^[5]
• Mons. Sergey Timashov (since 2017) ^[6]

•   Object of cultural heritage No. 7100107000
• Official site