Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, Tallinn: seat of Estonia’s first Catholic diocese in 500 years, and a martyr beatified in 2025

On Vene street, in the old town of Tallinn, the cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul stands on the site of the refectory of the suppressed Dominican monastery of Saint Catherine. The building was granted in 1799 to the small local Catholic parish, after the Russian annexation had brought greater religious tolerance. The present building was raised between 1841 and 1844 to a design by the Italian-Russian architect Carlo Rossi, known above all for the Alexander Column and the General Staff Building in Saint Petersburg, and was consecrated on 26 December 1845. The west front seen today, however, was rebuilt between 1920 and 1924 by the architects Erich Jacoby and Franz de Vries, departing from the original design of Rossi. The apostolic administration of Estonia was erected on 1 November 1924 by Pope Pius XI, detached from the Catholic archdiocese of Riga, with a community of some two thousand faithful. Bishop Eduard Profittlich, a Jesuit, led it from 1931 and brought it to fourteen priests, before being arrested by the Soviet NKVD on 27 June 1941 and deported to the prison of Kirov, in Russia, where he died of privation on 22 February 1942, before his death sentence could be carried out. The see then remained vacant for about fifty years during the Soviet occupation. Profittlich was beatified on 6 September 2025 in Freedom Square in Tallinn, the first Catholic beatus in Estonian history, after Pope Francis had recognised his martyrdom in December 2024. On 26 September 2024 the same Pope Francis raised the apostolic administration to the diocese of Tallinn, the first Catholic diocese in Estonia in some five hundred years, exempt and subject directly to the Holy See. Philippe Jourdan, apostolic administrator since 2005, became its first bishop, installed in this cathedral on 3 November 2024. Estonia is among the least religious countries in the world: the census of 2021 records 58.6 per cent of the population with no religious affiliation, and a Gallup survey of 2006-2008 found that only fourteen per cent of Estonians considered religion important in daily life, the lowest share among one hundred and forty-three countries studied. Catholics are estimated at about seven thousand people, fewer than one per cent of the population. Pope Francis visited this cathedral on 25 September 2018, meeting there people helped by the charitable works of the Church, as part of a journey to the three Baltic states that also included an open-air mass in Freedom Square before more than ten thousand people. He was only the second pope to visit Estonia, after John Paul II in 1993.