ST. PETERSBURG -- If all goes according to plan Thursday, Russia's only Roman Catholic seminary will have returned to its pre-Revolutionary home here and begin operating after a 76-year lapse.


"On 12 October, Columbus Day, we are going to the new America, St. Petersburg," said seminary head Monsignor Bernardo Antonini, an Italian priest who started the seminary in Moscow, but has seen frequent moves. "Each year we change the address. This year we change the town, too."


The seminary, called Our Lady Queen of the Apostles, has had trouble finding adequate space for its 50 students in Moscow and so this fall has gradually been moving seminarians and faculty to the St. Petersburg building it occupied until a forced closure in 1919.


In conditions more closely resembling those in a monastery than a modern seminary, some students and faculty have already been living on the third floor of the 19th-century St. Petersburg building for the past several weeks.


There is one toilet and one sink for the seminarians. Hot water only recently arrived. Each meal involves a walk to a nearby technological institute. And, because their downstairs neighbor is a bank, they are literally locked in the building from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. every day.


In April, St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak returned ownership of the seminary building at 11 Pervaya Krasnoarmeyskaya to Catholic officials along with the large, completely gutted Italianate church in back. Antonini hopes that when the seminary is in its sixth year, enrollment will reach 100. By that time, he said, the building's other occupants will have left, if all goes according to plan.


Were Antonini's goal to be reached, enrollment would still fall short of the pre-Revolutionary numbers, when in 1914, for example, 145 seminarians were enrolled, according to Stanislav Kozlov, a third-year seminarian.


In 1917, said Kozlov, St. Petersburg had 16 Latin-rite Catholic churches. The seminary, however, served only non-Russians -- Poles and Lithuanians, for example -- so as not to threaten Russian Orthodoxy. Russians studied in the Vatican. Now, the seminary includes a majority of Russians but also students of eight other nationalities. Currently, of the 115 priests working in Russia, only two are Russian.


Post-Soviet relations between the Russian Orthodox and the Roman Catholic faiths have been strained at times, with some Orthodox clerics accusing the better-funded Catholics of proselytizing in Russia -- something the Vatican has forbidden. And, Catholics have charged that the patriarchate has used its government connections to stymie the return of former Catholic church property.


Lately though, relations seem to be improving as witnessed by the founding this year of a joint Catholic-Orthodox radio station. Antonini said he expected the seminary to be better received in St. Petersburg than it had been in Moscow. "We hope that relations in St. Petersburg will be better than here," he said in a Moscow interview during which he declined to be more specific. "The Patriarchy and the faculty of [the seminary at] Sergiev Posad are located here...In St. Petersburg, the president of the theological faculty and some professors are sympathetic to the Catholic church."


Yakov Krotov, a Moscow-based church historian, said the move was a healthy one for the seminary. "Maybe it is good that they are far from the big bosses." St. Petersburg's leading Orthodox cleric is the archconservative Metropolitan Ioann. Krotov said that the metropolitan, while no friend of the western church, is unlikely to be a serious hindrance. "I don't think he will ever lead an open struggle with the Catholics."


While the numbers of Catholics in Russia -- between 350,000 and 400,000 -- are tiny in comparison to those of the Orthodox, the future strength of the community will depend on the seminary. However, given the restrictions placed on its activities in Russia by the Vatican, the church is unlikely to grow significantly.


"My suspicion is that the majority [of Catholics] will always be of other ethnic backgrounds -- Germans or Poles," said Father Paul Roberson, an American Catholic priest and author of "The Eastern Christian Churches."


"The particularly Russian form of Christianity is Byzantine -- Orthodoxy," he said.