CATHERINE II of Anhalt-Zerbst, Empress of Russia. — B. at Stettin on 2 May 1729, d. at St Petersburg on 6 Nov. 1796; reigned from 1762 to 1796. Educated in Protestantism in her native land, she later converted to Russian Orthodoxy upon her marriage to the future Emperor Peter III (1762), only to embrace a certain deism drawn from the French Enlightenment. During her reign, the doctrine of the omnipotence of the State in Russia reached its zenith. She definitively entrusted to the State the administration of all the property of the Russian Church; she divided bishoprics and monasteries into three categories and reorganised diocesan administration along the lines of Protestant consistories. A reluctant bishop was arrested, but in general the Russian Church submitted to these intrusions. With the partial annexation of Poland, many Latin- and Ruthenian-rite Catholics came under Catherine’s rule. The Latin-rite bishop Stanislao Bohusz-Siestrzenciewicz readily accepted all her decrees, even those canonically inadmissible. To avert the worst consequences, the papal legate Archetti erected in 1783 the archbishopric of Mohilev for all Latin-rite Catholics resident in Russia.
Catherine initially granted full liberty to the Ruthenian-rite Catholics; soon, however, she sought to weaken their union through administrative measures, as if it were merely a “Polish” question. In 1784, Eraclio Lissowski, not overly steadfast, was appointed archbishop of Polotsk and carried out Catherine’s absolutist measures without resistance. Whole communities of Ruthenian-rite Catholics were forcibly incorporated into the State Church, especially after the dissolution of the metropolis of Kiev. Yet after Catherine’s death many of these returned to Catholic unity.
Catherine did not permit within her empire the canonical promulgation of the brief of Clement XIV dissolving the Society of Jesus, which thus continued its activity for many more years.