MOSCOW - The leader of Russia's Roman Catholics, anxious and sleep-deprived after a harrowing few weeks, is starting to detect progress in his latest struggle with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz was invited to the Kremlin on Thursday - the Russian leadership's first positive overture toward Catholics since the Vatican upgraded its Russian presence to full-fledged dioceses this month.

And on Saturday, the pope - whose long-standing bid to visit Russia has been persistently rebuffed by the Orthodox patriarch - will lead Russian Catholics in prayer via a video link.

The Vatican's Feb. 11 decision met with impassioned opposition from the Orthodox Church, which accused Catholics of poaching converts in Orthodox territory and threatening its own resurrection efforts after decades of state-sponsored atheism. The Foreign Ministry objected to the move, and Orthodox leaders warned it could jeopardize Pope John Paul II's drive to mend the millennium-old rift between their churches.

"It's all a misunderstanding," Kondrusiewicz, a Pole born in Soviet Belarus, told The Associated Press on Thursday. "A reaction was to be expected. But I didn't think it would be so strong."

He was encouraged after a Kremlin meeting with the deputy head of the president's domestic policy department. "I feel we have the full support of the presidential administration," Kondrusiewicz said.

The pope is intent on reaching out to Russia's 600,000 Catholics, a tiny minority in a nation of 144, million where two-thirds of the population consider themselves Orthodox.

Parishioners have come to Kondrusiewicz in tears recently, complaining that the indignant rhetoric by Orthodox leaders on national newscasts since Feb. 11 has made them afraid to practice their faith.

The stocky, excitable archbishop himself has spent the past 17 days deflecting criticism and trying to salvage conciliation efforts. "We need to talk and keep talking, on the highest levels," he said.

Orthodox leaders don't see it that way. Metropolitan Kirill, the church's chief of foreign relations, said contacts with papal representatives could be suspended because of the Vatican decision, and the Orthodox Church later refused to receive a Vatican envoy.

Kondrusiewicz would not say why the Vatican chose this month to elevate its apostolic administrations to dioceses.

Russian media have speculated that the Vatican has given up hope of a papal visit to Russia anytime soon and decided to abandon its conciliatory stance toward the Orthodox Church.

Other analysts, including Britain's Keston Institute, suggest the Vatican was encouraged by President Vladimir Putin's recent warm words toward the pope and decided the westward-looking Kremlin is distancing itself from Orthodox stalwarts, making it a safe time to expand the Catholic presence.

Putin told a Polish newspaper in January that he was eager to invite John Paul to Moscow soon, but added that the visit would hinge on a Vatican-Orthodox settlement.

Kondrusiewicz gave no credence to either theory. "The time had come, that's all," he said.

The Catholic Church establishes apostolic administrations only in "extreme situations" such as the volatile period around the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, and they are meant to be temporary, he said.

Kondrusiewicz insisted most Russians have "no problem" with Catholics and that Catholics aren't proselytizing in Russia.

Kondrusiewicz, 56, has faced discrimination for his beliefs since his teen-age years. He abandoned his studies at a teacher's institute in Belarus after local newspapers expressed alarm that a future Soviet educator regularly attended Catholic Mass.

He fled to the more liberal Lenin grad, where he received an engineering degree before entering a Lithuanian seminary at age 30. Fluent in several languages, he speaks Russian and English with the slightest of accents.

Kondrusiewicz will oversee the Russian side of Saturday's papal video link, which will also be shown in other European cities. Hours later, Kondrusiewicz will leave for Washington, where he will meet with Russian-American Catholics.

"The pope of Rome will come" to Russia, he said. Asked if it would be the current pope, Kondrusiewicz smiled. "The pope will come. I would hope it is today's pope."