Church of Our Lady of Loreto

The first Catholics appeared in Orenburg at the end of the XVIII — beginning of the XIX century, after the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a large number of Poles were exiled here. In the 19th century, the Polish diaspora in the city increased due to the exiled participants of the Polish uprisings. In 1839, at the request of priest Candida Zelenka, a Catholic church was opened here.

In 1844, permission was granted for the construction of a Catholic church, and the foundation stone was laid in the same year. The construction took three years, and on November 16, 1847, the church was consecrated in honor of the Mother of God of Loreto. The church was part of the Diocese of Tiraspol, its rector was K. Zelenka.

Active charitable activities were carried out at the church, in 1898 a parish charitable society was founded, and in 1904 an elementary school. Before the First World War, the number of the parish increased due to refugees from the western provinces of Russia and amounted to about 5,000 people.

In 1932, the church was closed by the Soviet authorities, and church utensils were looted. Until the 90s, the church building housed the workshop of a tannery, while the building was radically rebuilt to meet the needs of the factory.

In the 1990s, the normalization of the Catholic Church in Russia began. In 1993, the Catholic parish was re-registered, and in 1994, the church building, which had been reduced to a catastrophic state, was transferred to the parish. Large-scale restoration work lasted over two years. On November 23, 1997, exactly 150 years after the first consecration, the Church of Our Lady of Loreto was rededicated by Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz. Priests from the Redemptorist order work in the parish.