Leadership Quote by Vladimir Zhirinovsky

It reads like a shrug, but it’s really a border post disguised as policy. “Let Catholics build their own churches and works” is the kind of sentence that pretends to grant permission while quietly announcing who owns the public square. The verb “let” does the heavy lifting: Catholics aren’t framed as citizens exercising a right, but as a tolerated minority whose religious life is acceptable only if it stays self-funded, self-contained, and, crucially, separate.

With Zhirinovsky, that’s never accidental. His politics thrived on turning identity into a management problem: define an “us,” then offer the “them” a narrow lane where they can exist without “burdening” the majority. The line carries the insinuation that Catholic institutions are foreign imports, suspiciously networked, and financially backed from outside - a familiar trope in Russian nationalist rhetoric, where Orthodoxy is treated less as faith than as cultural infrastructure of the state.

The context is post-Soviet Russia’s uneasy religious marketplace: formal pluralism paired with a tacit hierarchy, with the Russian Orthodox Church positioned as a civilizational anchor. In that landscape, demanding that Catholics “build their own” isn’t a neutral budget note; it’s a way to deny legitimacy without banning anything. You don’t have to persecute a group if you can reclassify them as guests who should keep to their own corner.

The line works because it sounds practical and even fair - no one’s stopping you - while smuggling in a politics of containment. It’s permission as a leash.