Death — 1908

St. John of Kronstadt bore a painful final illness publicly through 1908, celebrating the Divine Liturgy almost to the end; he served his last Liturgy on December 9/10 and reposed on December 20, 1908 (January 2, 1909 New Style). His funeral was on a scale unprecedented in Russian history, and he was buried in the Ioannovsky Convent he had founded on the Karpovka river in St. Petersburg, where veneration began at once.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified ROCOR 1964, Moscow Patriarchate 1990)

The Last Years and the Final Illness

St. John’s health began to fail from about 1906. In his final years he suffered from a painful chronic illness — described in the biographical tradition as a wasting disease involving severe and increasing physical suffering — which he bore publicly and without complaint, treating it, in the spirit of his whole teaching, as a cross to be carried with thanksgiving (Semenoff-Tian-Chansky, Father John of Kronstadt: A Life; cf. fatheralexander.org, “Holy Father John of the Kronstadt”). His endurance of the illness became, for those who watched him, a final lesson: the priest who had urged repentance and warned of judgment now showed how a Christian dies. Despite his weakness he refused to abandon his daily Liturgy, the center of his life, for as long as his body would allow.

The public character of his dying is itself significant. Fr. John had spent decades as the most visible priest in Russia, the object of a national devotion documented in the thousands of letters and the crowds at Kronstadt that Kizenko studies (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint). His decline was therefore followed by the whole country; the faithful prayed for him, and his patient suffering was read by his admirers as the seal of a holy life. He had taught that bodily affliction, accepted in faith, is spiritually fruitful — and in his last illness he was seen to live out that teaching, refusing to let pain make him bitter or to interrupt, while he could stand, his offering of the Liturgy.

The Last Liturgies

Even as the disease advanced, St. John continued to celebrate the Divine Liturgy. The biographical record states that he “continued to celebrate his daily Divine Liturgy until December 10, 1908” — his last celebrations falling on December 9/10, just ten or eleven days before his repose (biographical tradition; cf. Wikipedia, “John of Kronstadt”; Semenoff-Tian-Chansky, Father John of Kronstadt: A Life). That he served the Eucharist almost literally to his deathbed is fitting for the priest whose whole spirituality had been eucharistic: the Liturgy was the breath of his life to the last, as prayer was the breathing of the soul (see Liturgical Maximalism). For decades he had urged the faithful not to wait at a distance from the chalice but to commune frequently, and he had practiced what he preached by celebrating daily; that he kept this rule until ten days before his death gives the practice a final seal. There is a fittingness, too, in the date: he who had warned that Russia must not let go of God communed of God himself until his strength failed, and then was gone. The last Liturgies of December 1908 are the natural close of a life that had been, from end to end, an offering at the altar (see The Divine Liturgy).

Death: December 20, 1908 / January 2, 1909

St. John reposed at his home in Kronstadt on December 20, 1908 (Old Style), which corresponds to January 2, 1909 on the New (Gregorian) calendar, at the age of seventy-nine (in his eightieth year) (Wikipedia, “John of Kronstadt”; OrthodoxWiki, “John of Kronstadt”; Semenoff-Tian-Chansky, Father John of Kronstadt: A Life). The date Old Style is now kept as his principal feast; he is also commemorated on October 19 / November 1 (Old Style / New Style — the date of his birth in 1829 and of the ROCOR glorification in 1964) (Wikipedia and OrthodoxWiki, “John of Kronstadt”). The double dating reflects the gap between the Julian calendar in civil and ecclesiastical use in Russia until 1918 and the Gregorian calendar elsewhere; the thirteen-day difference applies to twentieth-century dates, so December 20, 1908 O.S. is January 2, 1909 N.S.

The Reaction of the Nation

News of his death produced an extraordinary outpouring of public grief. Telegrams of condolence arrived from across the empire and from the highest levels of church and state. For a society already convulsed by the aftershocks of 1905 and increasingly polarized, the death of the priest who had embodied the older, sacramental Russia was felt by his admirers as the passing of an age. The secular and the radical press, which had often mocked him in life and resented his denunciations, could not ignore the scale of the mourning; the conservative and church press treated his death as a national bereavement. Kizenko reads this moment as the high-water mark of the popular Orthodox piety he had done so much to shape — a piety that within a decade would meet the catastrophe he had warned of (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint).

The Funeral

The funeral was an event without precedent in Russian history. The body was carried from Kronstadt across the ice and through St. Petersburg to the convent he had founded, accompanied by enormous crowds; the biographical sources speak of “innumerable crowds” joining the procession, with figures of no fewer than twenty thousand following the coffin and the bells of the city’s churches — even, it was reported, those of non-Orthodox churches — tolling for him (biographical tradition; cf. Wikipedia and OrthodoxWiki, “John of Kronstadt”; Semenoff-Tian-Chansky, Father John of Kronstadt: A Life). Troops lined the route to hold back the multitudes, and the procession moved through streets packed with mourners. The scale of public mourning matched the scale of the devotion he had attracted in life, when pilgrims had come to Kronstadt from across the empire to confess and commune at his hand; Kizenko treats the funeral as the culminating public manifestation of the national cult that had formed around him (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint). Contemporary accounts describe the route from Kronstadt — the naval fortress-island in the Gulf of Finland where he had served for more than half a century — across to the capital and through its center to the Karpovka, every stage of it lined with weeping crowds. For a brief moment the divided nation was united in grief around the bier of a parish priest, an event whose like the empire would not see again.

Burial at the Ioannovsky Convent on the Karpovka

St. John was buried in the Ioannovsky (St. John of Rila) Convent on the Karpovka river embankment in St. Petersburg — a women’s monastery he had himself founded and to which he was deeply attached. His body was laid in a church-crypt within the convent, which immediately became a place of pilgrimage (Semenoff-Tian-Chansky, Father John of Kronstadt: A Life; cf. OrthodoxWiki, “John of Kronstadt”). After the Revolution the convent was closed and the crypt sealed by the Soviet authorities; the monastery was reopened in the post-Soviet period, and the site of his burial on the Karpovka is once again a major center of his veneration (Archives of Orthodox America, “St. John of Kronstadt Convent Reopened,” used to locate the convent’s later history).

Immediate Veneration and the Synod’s Memorial Measures

Veneration of St. John began without waiting for any formal act. Requiems were served constantly at his tomb, believers flocked to the convent, and his reputation as a saint — already established in his lifetime — was treated as confirmed by his repose (Semenoff-Tian-Chansky, Father John of Kronstadt: A Life). This continuity between his living and his posthumous cult is one of Kizenko’s central themes: unlike many saints who are discovered only after death, Fr. John had been venerated as a living wonderworker for decades, so that his death did not create his cult but transferred an existing one from the man to his memory and his tomb (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint). The crowds that had pressed around him at Kronstadt simply redirected themselves to the Karpovka. The Most Holy Synod responded to the national grief with memorial measures: official mourning, the prescription of memorial services, and the encouragement of annual commemoration of the reposed pastor, reflecting the extraordinary place he had held in the religious life of the empire (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint, on the official and popular response to his death; biographical tradition). Formal glorification, however, came only later and in stages, and the delay is itself instructive. In the Synodal period the canonization of a recently deceased and politically controversial figure was a slow and cautious business, and the Revolution then made any official act by the Russian Church impossible for generations. It fell first to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), the church of the emigration, to act: the ROCOR glorified him on November 1, 1964 — its first canonization undertaken independently of the Moscow Patriarchate, and a deeply significant act for a diaspora that saw in St. John both a national saint and a prophet of the catastrophe that had scattered them (Wikipedia, “John of Kronstadt”). The Moscow Patriarchate glorified him only in 1990 (June 8, 1990), as church life was liberalized in the final years of the Soviet Union, restoring him at last to the official calendar of the church on whose soil he had served (Wikipedia and OrthodoxWiki, “John of Kronstadt”). The popular cult had thus run a full half-century and more ahead of the canonical acts that ratified it — a striking instance of veneration preceding, and eventually compelling, official recognition.

The convent on the Karpovka where his body lies has likewise had a representative twentieth-century history: founded and beloved by the saint, closed and desecrated under the Soviet regime, and reopened and restored in the post-Soviet revival, it stands today as both his burial place and a monument to the destruction and recovery of Russian church life across the century his warnings had foreseen (Archives of Orthodox America, “St. John of Kronstadt Convent Reopened”). Pilgrims again descend to the crypt where he was laid in January 1909, completing a circle that runs from the immediate, spontaneous veneration of 1908–1909, through the long Soviet eclipse, to the renewed national devotion of the present day.

References

Semenoff-Tian-Chansky, Bishop Alexander. Father John of Kronstadt: A Life. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press (English translation of the Russian text published New York, 1955).
Kizenko, Nadieszda. A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.
St. John of Kronstadt. My Life in Christ. Trans. E. E. Goulaeff.
“John of Kronstadt.” Wikipedia (used to locate the dates of death — Dec. 20, 1908 O.S. / Jan. 2, 1909 N.S. — the Dec. 10, 1908 last Liturgy, the funeral figures, and the ROCOR 1964 / Moscow Patriarchate 1990 glorification dates; cross-checked against the biographical tradition).
“John of Kronstadt.” OrthodoxWiki (used to locate burial at the Ioannovsky Convent and the date of repose).
“The Cry of the New Martyrs — St. John of Kronstadt Convent Reopened.” Archives of Orthodox America, roca.org (used to locate the later history of the Karpovka convent).