The Catholic Church and Russia: Popes, Patriarchs, Tsars and Commissars

The Catholic Church and Russia: Popes, Patriarchs, Tsars and Commissars. By DENNIS J. DUNN (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004; pp. 260. £50). GIVEN the current state of Russian Orthodox-Catholic relations, Russia's ‘encounter with Catholicism’ is an interesting and under-researched area which deserves a balanced and nuanced analysis. Alas, this is not it. Dunn is a convinced advocate of Catholicism as a modernising, enlightening and liberating force, and ultimately, his partisan fervour detracts from the potentially useful information contained in at least two-thirds of the book. The first, introductory, chapter sets the general tone with the title ‘Russia's problem with Catholicism’, and covers the period from the tenth century conversion of Kievan Rus to the seventeenth century in frustratingly few pages. In it Dunn introduces his central thesis, that Russia (as if it were one unified and consistent consciousness rather than an immense country with a complex and variegated history, geography and demography) has a problem with Catholicism because ‘the Catholic Church's insistence that it be free to preach the gospel, to inspire change in individual lives and judge governments in the light of Christ's teachings’ conflicts with Russian absolutism (p. 13). As an historian of Russian Orthodoxy, I find this a weak thesis. As a Catholic with reasonable knowledge of my own Church's history, I find it an astonishing proposition. Dunn also clouds matters by equating Catholicism with the West and, by implication, with ‘Civilisation’ itself.