Canonization (1977)

The glorification of St. Innocent: his canonization by the Russian Orthodox Church on 6 October 1977, made on the petition of the Orthodox Church in America, which had received its autocephaly only seven years before; his titles — Equal-to-the-Apostles, Enlightener of the Aleuts, Apostle to America; and his feast days, 31 March (his repose, on Holy Saturday) and 6 October (his glorification).

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

A Glorification Long in Coming

St. Innocent died in 1879 (see The Missionary Society) revered throughout the Russian Church as a great missionary and metropolitan, his relics resting at the Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra. But his formal glorification — the Church’s solemn recognition of him as a saint — did not come until nearly a century after his death, and it came in circumstances that bound together the two halves of his life’s work, the Russian and the American.

He was glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church (the Moscow Patriarchate) on 6 October 1977, under Patriarch Pimen (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9 and epilogue; Glorification of St. Innocent, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]; Innocent of Alaska, OrthodoxWiki [orthodoxwiki.org]). The act was notable in its own right: canonizations were rare under the Soviet-era Patriarchate, which lived under heavy state constraint, and the glorification of a missionary saint with a strong American connection at the height of the Cold War was a significant ecclesiastical event.

The rarity is worth dwelling on, because it is what gives the 1977 act its particular weight. Under the Soviet regime the Russian Orthodox Church survived only within tight limits set by an officially atheist state that had spent decades closing churches, suppressing monasteries, and imprisoning and killing clergy. Formal glorifications of new saints were correspondingly infrequent; the Patriarchate of those years had neither the freedom nor the institutional latitude to canonize readily, and decades could pass with few or no additions to the calendar. For the Moscow Patriarchate to glorify a saint at all in 1977 was therefore a notable assertion of the Church’s continuing life under constraint. That the saint in question was a great missionary — and one whose memory was venerated above all by an American daughter church — gave the act a further resonance in the divided ecclesiastical and political world of the Cold War, when contact between the Church in Russia and the Orthodox of the West was freighted with suspicion on every side. The glorification of Innocent quietly affirmed, across that divide, the bond between the Russian Church and the Orthodoxy of the New World that had grown from its own missions.

The American Petition

What makes the 1977 glorification especially fitting is that it was made on the petition of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) (Glorification of St. Innocent, oca.org; Garrett, St. Innocent, epilogue). The OCA — the American church that grew directly from the Alaska mission Innocent had founded and steered toward an American future (see Toward the American Church) — had received its autocephaly (self-governance) from the Moscow Patriarchate in 1970, only seven years earlier (see Orthodoxy Guide: Orthodoxy in America). It was the daughter church in America, asking its mother church in Russia to glorify the man who stood at the head of them both. The OCA recognizes Innocent as one of its founders, and venerates him as such.

That a glorification could come about in this way says something about the channels through which sanctity is recognized in the Orthodox world. A glorification is not a private devotion but a corporate act of the Church, and it ordinarily proceeds from the local church most attached to the saint’s memory. In Innocent’s case that church was the new American one, for which he was not a remote Russian metropolitan but the founder of its own existence — the bishop who had given the Alaska mission its native clergy and its English-facing future, and from whose work the American Church directly descended. For the OCA to bring the petition was therefore the natural expression of a living veneration, and for Moscow to grant it was for the mother church to honor the daughter’s memory of their common father. The act knit the two churches together at a moment when both had reasons to feel the bond: the OCA newly autocephalous and seeking to root its identity in the saints of its own soil, and the Moscow Patriarchate able, through this glorification, to affirm the fruitfulness of the Russian mission whose greatest apostle Innocent had been.

So the glorification of 1977 was a double act of memory: the Russian Church honoring one of its greatest hierarchs, and the American Church honoring its apostolic founder — the two recognitions meeting in the one saint who had been Metropolitan of Moscow and Apostle to America alike. He had been preceded in the calendar of American Orthodox saints by St. Herman of Alaska, glorified in 1970 (see Innocent, Herman, and the Alaska Mission).

The relation between the two churches gives the petition its poignancy. The OCA had received its autocephaly from Moscow only in 1970, and that grant was itself contested by other Orthodox jurisdictions; the young American church was, in 1977, still establishing its standing in the Orthodox world. For it to petition its mother church to glorify the founder common to them both was an act that bound daughter to mother across the Cold-War divide and asserted, in the language of the calendar of saints, the continuity between the Russian mission of the nineteenth century and the American Church of the twentieth. It is fitting that the two saints the American Church holds as its founders were raised to the altars in the same brief span — Herman the hermit in 1970, the very year of the autocephaly, and Innocent the apostle-bishop in 1977 — as if the new self-governing Church were taking up, almost at once, the memory of both the strands from which it had grown.

Titles and Feast Days

St. Innocent is venerated under the title Equal-to-the-Apostles (Ravnoapostolnyi) — the highest missionary rank in the Orthodox calendar, shared with Saints Cyril and Methodius, St. Nina of Georgia, and the Emperor Constantine — together with the descriptive titles Enlightener of the Aleuts and Apostle to America (and, more fully, Enlightener of the peoples of Alaska and Siberia, Metropolitan of Moscow) (Glorification of St. Innocent, oca.org; Innocent of Alaska, OrthodoxWiki).

The title Equal-to-the-Apostles is not lightly bestowed. The Orthodox Church reserves it for that small company of saints whose work it judges to be of the same order as the apostles’ own — the bringing of whole peoples to the faith for the first time. To stand with Cyril and Methodius, who gave the Slavs their letters and their liturgy; with Nina, who enlightened Georgia; with Constantine, under whom the Empire turned to Christ; with Vladimir, who baptized the Rus’ — this is to be reckoned not merely a great bishop or a holy man but a founder of a Christian people. The Church applied the title to Innocent for precisely the reasons that run through his whole life: he did for the Aleut and the peoples of Alaska and Siberia what Cyril and Methodius had done for the Slavs — reduced their speech to writing, gave them the Scriptures and the services in their own tongue, and planted among them a Church that could endure. The descriptive titles fill out the picture: Enlightener of the Aleuts names the people to whom he first carried the faith; Apostle to America names the continent whose Orthodoxy reckons him a founder; and Metropolitan of Moscow names the unlikely summit to which the frontier priest at last ascended. Taken together they compass a single, extraordinary trajectory — from a Siberian village to the Aleutian Islands to the senior throne of the Russian Church — and the Church’s judgment that the whole of it was apostolic.

He is commemorated on two principal feast days:

• 31 March — the day of his repose in 1879, which fell that year on Great and Holy Saturday.
• 6 October — the day of his glorification in 1977.

(He is also commemorated within the Synaxis of the Moscow Hierarchs and on regional Alaskan and North American synaxes of saints.) (Glorification of St. Innocent, oca.org; Repose of St. Innocent, oca.org.) [Note on calendar: 31 March and 6 October are the calendar dates as observed; churches on the Julian calendar keep them with the customary thirteen-day civil offset, but the liturgical dates are 31 March and 6 October.]

The two feast days are themselves a kind of summary of his life. The first, 31 March, fixes the Church’s memory on the day of his repose — and so, by the providential coincidence the tradition cherishes, on Great and Holy Saturday, the threshold of Pascha (see The Missionary Society). The second, 6 October, marks not his death but the day in 1977 on which the Church declared him a saint, joining the daughter church in America that had petitioned for the act to the mother church in Russia that performed it. His inclusion in the Synaxis of the Moscow Hierarchs sets him among the great bishops of the Russian Church’s senior see; his place in the Alaskan and North American synaxes sets him among the founders of American Orthodoxy. The same saint is thus kept in two registers at once — as Metropolitan of Moscow in the Russian calendar, and as Apostle to America in the American — which is no contradiction but the simple truth of a life that belonged to both.

Across the Orthodox world he is now venerated as one of the great missionary saints — the parish priest from a Siberian village who gave peoples an alphabet and the Gospel in their own tongue, and whom the Church reckons among the equals of the apostles. His glorification did not so much change his place in the Church’s memory as ratify it: it gave liturgical and canonical form to a veneration that had quietly endured, on both sides of the Pacific, since the day they buried him at the Lavra on the threshold of Pascha in 1879.

See Also

• Reception and Scholarship — the biographies and studies through which his memory is now carried
• The Missionary Society — his death in 1879 and burial at the Lavra
• Toward the American Church — the OCA that petitioned for his glorification
• Innocent, Herman, and the Alaska Mission — St. Herman, glorified in 1970
• Orthodoxy Guide: Orthodoxy in America — the OCA, the 1970 autocephaly, and the American saints

References

• Glorification of Saint Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow, Enlightener of the Aleuts and Apostle to America. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, October 6. (Glorification 6 October 1977 by the Moscow Patriarchate on the OCA’s petition; titles; feast of 6 October.)
• Repose of Saint Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, March 31. (Feast of 31 March, the day of his repose.)
• Innocent of Alaska. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (Glorification 1977; titles; feast days 31 March and 6 October.)
• Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The reverence in which he was held and the path to his glorification.)