This page briefly covers the history of the Catholic Church in the territory that is now the Diocese of St. Joseph in Irkutsk. The existence of Catholics in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East is closely linked with the Russian policy of political and penal banishment of the 17th-19th centuries. At the beginning of the 19th century, the first Catholic missionary priests arrived. From 1806 to 1812 a mission of the Dominican Fathers was realized in Irkutsk.