Millions of people across the world tuned into online church services on Sunday as their usual places of worship were closed, but in some places clerics insisted on their doors remaining open.

The day after Pope Francis delivered a blessing in an empty St Peter’s Square, watched on television by an estimated 11 million people, Sunday services were held at some of Russia’s largest religious sites after Orthodox church leaders said they were an expression of religious freedom.

Dozens of parishioners, many of them elderly, crowded into Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg to receive communion…