Culture : Church Is No Sanctuary From Battles : Conflict with Moscow government has put a nun in the hospital and riot police behind the altar.

With its roof collapsing, foundation crumbling and the interior occupied by city workshops, the red brick building that once was the Church of the Immaculate Conception looks beyond rescue as a place of worship.

But Moscow’s Roman Catholics have vowed to recover their nearly ruined property from a reluctant city government, even if that leads to further confrontations like those that have already sent parishioners to jail, a nun to the hospital and riot police behind the altar.

The neo-Gothic church on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street in fact belongs to its Roman Catholic parish, one of only two in the Russian capital. But the building remains occupied by a Moscow city construction enterprise that says it has nowhere else to go.

Neither the city nor the struggling Catholic parish shows any willingness to back off from a battle that has become so emotional that parishioners, despairing of ever reclaiming their church, went on a rampage March 8, breaking down walls and throwing city tools and equipment into the street.

City officials retaliated last Tuesday by barging into the church sanctuary to replace the damaged wall with sheets of metal in a pre-dawn construction barrage protected by armed police officers.

The altercations highlight the explosive nature of property battles being waged throughout Moscow, where living and working space was already in short supply before the post-Communist government promised the repatriation of church assets seized under decades of Soviet rule.

“The Moscow government first promised this building to us back in 1992, and we are still waiting,” said Father Kazimir Shedelko, a priest from Poland who has been helping Moscow Catholics rebuild the Immaculate Conception parish and the only Roman Catholic seminary in Russia. “Instead, more and more commercial firms are leasing our space from the city.”

The church, first consecrated in 1911, was seized and looted in 1935 by Communist authorities under Josef Stalin and converted into a four-story workers dormitory. Steel braces more befitting a railroad bridge than a church interior support the upper floors that, since 1958, have been used as office space for the Moscow city government’s Drafting and Design Technology Institute.

Since the government first acted in 1990 to reverse the religious repression of the Soviet era, hundreds of other churches and monasteries have been given back to the communities of faithful they belonged to.

A specific order to vacate the Malaya Gruzinskaya property was issued by Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov in February, 1992, with the proviso that new quarters designated for the city design institute be ready within two years.

The parish was allowed to move into about half of the church’s ground floor in the meantime, but heavy printing machinery continued to operate on the other side of a thin wall behind the altar.

When Luzhkov’s office issued the design enterprise another two-year extension on March 7, “the parishioners’ patience ran out,” Shedelko said.

After the worship service that day, he and the parish rector, Father Josef Zanevsky, led about 60 churchgoers up to the abandoned fourth floor to lay claim to that part of the building. The next night, after a meeting of the church council, a group of parishioners knocked down the wall behind the altar and began throwing city equipment into the surrounding yard.

Yevgeny P. Afanasyev, director of the design institute, had already summoned riot police to the neighborhood on the basis of what he said was the trespass of the night before. Police officers used truncheons to beat the churchgoers back from the city offices, according to witnesses.

“It was shocking. I had never seen armed police coming into a church and kicking believers out, beating up old women with boots and sticks,” recalled Galina Varkachuk, a 45-year-old Catholic visiting from Ukraine.

A spokesman for the police precinct that sent the riot squad to contain the church conflict denied there were any beatings.

“As for the nun who was hospitalized with a concussion, it was all her own fault,” insisted Maj. Ivan P. Danilov. He said the nun, Sister Maria Stetskaya, brought injury on herself when she threw a bucket of water at the police officers, prompting them to charge the platform she was standing on, which then collapsed. Varkachuk said she saw police kick Stetskaya in the head.

In the end, four of the parishioners were detained by police and fined the equivalent of about $15, and the Polish government protested the incident.

The dispute has become a venomous personal battle between the priests and the institute officials, with Afanasyev suing Zanevsky for about $18,000 in production losses and the priest accusing the city of rebuilding the wall “out of spite.”

Church services have continued quietly despite the confrontation, but both parishioners and institute workers say that the only thing preventing a repeat of violence is a round-the-clock police presence.

“Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable that some religious community or a group of believers would show up at the doors of a serious and decent design bureau and impudently tell them: ‘Get out! This building belongs to us,’ ” Danilov said. “Today, to my regret, it is possible. . . . This case with the church shows quite vividly that Russia is about to fall into the abyss of total anarchy,” Danilov said.

Moscow officials concede that the property belongs to the parish, but those charged with overseeing relations with the city’s religious communities also defend the design institute’s continued occupation of the church as unavoidable.

“We cannot find places for all worshipers overnight,” insisted Valery V. Zybkovets, an adviser to the city’s Committee on Relations with Religious Associations.

In defense of the de facto decision to retain the church for the immediate future, Zybkovets said more than 200 other churches, mostly Russian Orthodox facilities, have been turned over by the Moscow government during the last three years.

He also said the city has spent about $2.7 million to restore religious monuments damaged during the Communist era.

That officialdom has done better by the Russian Orthodox has been little comfort to Moscow Catholics, who Shedelko said number 70,000.

“This is discrimination,” he said of the city’s refusal to vacate the Church of Immaculate Conception. “We’ve said this many times, and it is the only explanation.”

Shedelko accused design institute Director Afanasyev of dragging his feet in relocating the city offices, and insisted that he is leasing out part of the premises to private businesses in a lucrative scheme that would collapse if he had to move.

The priest said one of those subletting space is a vodka retailer, which he described as the last straw for the parish.

Afanasyev denied that he is subletting space he controls at the church, but he added that he would need until the end of the year to move out even if new facilities were found for the institute soon.