Catholic Church in Azerbaijan

[3] Starting from 1320, Catholic missionaries such as Jordanus and Odoric of Pordenone have visited what is now Azerbaijan and have established missions mostly in large cities.

In 1660 Superior of the Capuchin Mission at Isfahan, friar Raphaël du Mans reported Catholic parishes functioning in Baku and Shamakhi.

[5] In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, efforts of Bartholomew, a Dominican missionary from Bologna, resulted in the conversion of 28 settlements in Nakhchivan (with Bənəniyar being the largest) into Catholicism.

[8] In the early twentieth century there was a community in Baku made up of Polish, German, and Russian immigrants for whose needs the Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was built in 1912.

[9] Two other smaller churches were built throughout the second half of the nineteenth century: in Qusar, where a hussar regiment made up of ethnic Poles had been quartered,[10] and in Zagatala where participants of the 1863 January Uprising had been exiled.

[11] As Azerbaijan is a secular country the 1996 law stated that foreigners have freedom of conscience, but denied the right to "carry out religious propaganda", i.e., to preach, under the threat of fines or deportation.

[21] When Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, the apostolic nuncio to Azerbaijan, visited the country he encountered many elderly believers who had waited almost 70 years to receive the sacrament of confirmation.

[25] The Apostolic Prefect is Bishop Vladimir Fekete, a Slovak like his fellow Salesian predecessors Jozef Pravda and Jan Čapla.

[30] In 2024, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican's Secretary for Relations with States and International Organisations, visited Azerbaijan to lay the foundation stone of a new Catholic church in Baku.