The Two Glorifications: ROCOR 1964, Moscow 1990

St. John of Kronstadt was glorified twice in the twentieth century: by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia on November 1, 1964 — the first canonization the Church Abroad ever performed in its own right — and by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Local Council of June 8, 1990, the first canonization of the post-Soviet era, days after the election of Patriarch Alexy II. Between these acts lay the Soviet suppression of his veneration: the closure of his Ioannovsky Convent, the bricking-up of his grave, and the survival of his cult through six decades of persecution.

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

ROCOR 1964: The First Canonization of the Church Abroad

A decision twice considered

Popular devotion to Father John of Kronstadt never lapsed in the Russian emigration; from the 1920s the diaspora kept his memory as that of a saint already, well before any conciliar act. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) first weighed a formal glorification at its Council of Bishops in 1953, but deferred. The decisive objection was raised by ROCOR’s First Hierarch, Metropolitan Anastassy (Gribanovsky), who held that “Father John’s canonization requires the participation of our Mother, the Russian Orthodox Church, liberated from captivity” — an expression of ROCOR’s self-understanding as a temporary body in exile, reluctant to exercise so weighty an act of the whole Russian Church while the homeland Church lay under Soviet control and could not take part (ROCOR Studies, “Canonization of St. John of Kronstadt by ROCOR in 1964,” 2023).

Even in 1953, however, the groundwork was being laid. The future St. John (Maximovitch) — then ruling hierarch of the Diocese of Western Europe and a tireless advocate of new glorifications — solicited written testimony from clergy concerning Father John’s holiness, and lay communities pressed the cause: the parishioners of St. Nicholas Church in Utica, New York, organized appeals and commemorative services in his honor (ROCOR Studies, 2023).

The 1964 reversal

The obstacle was Metropolitan Anastassy’s reservation; the turning point was the change of First Hierarch. On May 27, 1964, the Council of Bishops elected Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky) to succeed the aged Anastassy. The same Council, only a week later, on June 3, 1964, unanimously adopted a resolution to glorify Father John of Kronstadt (ROCOR Studies, 2023; the chronology — election of Philaret May 27, glorification resolved June 3 — is consistent with the Orthodoxy Guide’s ROCOR verification log, which records that the resolution to glorify was adopted after Philaret’s election, not before).

The Council justified reversing the 1953 deferral by pointing to the unrelieved — indeed intensifying — persecution of the Church in Russia. As the resolution reasoned, “more than ten years have transpired and not only have conditions not changed in the Russian land, but persecutions of Christ’s Church have intensified there,” so that the time had come “to appeal to heavenly assistance and to the prayerful intercession of this God-pleaser” (ROCOR Studies, 2023). What in 1953 had been an argument for waiting on the Mother Church became, by 1964, an argument that the emigration must act for the silenced Church: the persecuted homeland could not glorify him, so the free part of the Russian Church would.

The rite of November 1, 1964

The solemn glorification was celebrated on November 1, 1964, at the Synodal Cathedral of the Mother of God “of the Sign” (the Znamensky Cathedral) in New York, the headquarters church of the Synod of Bishops, together with the nearby Church of St. John of Rila in Utica — which from that moment became the Memorial Church of St. John of Kronstadt (ROCOR Studies, 2023; St. John of Kronstadt Russian Orthodox Memorial Church, Utica, NY). The rite followed the traditional Orthodox order of glorification: the last memorial service (panikhida) for the reposed Father John, the singing of the stichera to the new saint at the vigil, the unveiling of his icon, and the festal Liturgy at which he was invoked for the first time as a saint.

This was ROCOR’s first canonization — the first time the Church Abroad exercised the prerogative of glorifying a saint in its own right, independent of Moscow. As ROCOR Studies frames it, the 1964 act resolved “the theoretical possibility of the glorification of saints by the Russian Church Abroad … positively,” and it became the model and precedent for the glorifications that followed: St. Herman of Alaska (1970), Blessed Xenia of St. Petersburg (1978), the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia (1981), and St. John of Shanghai (1994) (ROCOR Studies, 2023; “The Order of Glorifying Saints in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (1920–2007),” ROCOR Studies; cross-referenced at Orthodoxy Guide: ROCOR Saints).

Why the emigration glorified him first — the symbolic stakes

That the first saint the Church Abroad ever canonized should be Father John of Kronstadt was not accidental. He was the great pastor of the late imperial Church, a figure of the Russia the emigration had lost and mourned; he had, in his last years, warned against the revolutionary catastrophe that did in fact engulf the country (see warnings-to-russia.md). To glorify him in New York in 1964 was for ROCOR to assert continuity with Holy Russia against the Soviet state that had suppressed his cult, and to claim the authority — and the duty — to act on behalf of a Church that could not yet act for itself. The glorification was thus both an act of devotion and an ecclesial-political statement: the free Russian Church abroad witnessing to a holiness the homeland regime had tried to erase.

The Soviet Suppression of His Veneration

The contrast with the homeland was stark. After the Revolution the Soviet authorities moved against the institutions and the cult that had grown around Father John.

The Ioannovsky Convent closed

The convent he had founded in St. Petersburg on the bank of the Karpovka River — the Ioannovsky (St. John’s) Convent, established in 1900 as a metochion of his Sura monastery, with its great Neo-Byzantine Cathedral of the Twelve Apostles built by the architect Nikolay Nikonov and completed in 1902 — held his tomb in a marble sepulchre in the lower (ground-floor) church (Wikipedia, “Ioannovsky Convent”; Rusmania, “Ioannovsky Convent”). The Soviets disbanded the convent in 1923, and it remained closed for the rest of the Soviet period; the buildings were put to secular use, and the grave-church was shut to pilgrims (Wikipedia, “Ioannovsky Convent”).

The grave’s survival

The fate of the relics under Soviet rule is genuinely uncertain, and the sources say so. As the convent was being closed in the years 1923–1926, the authorities discussed reburying the body in a cemetery, but the proposal met resistance from the Soviet side itself — officials feared that a new grave would simply become another site of veneration. In the event the crypt was bricked up, and there is no documentary record of any reburial (Wikipedia, “John of Kronstadt”; “Ioannovsky Convent”). After the convent’s revival the necropolis-church of St. John was reconsecrated in the crypt; the convent today holds that his relics remain in the sealed crypt, though no excavation has been conducted that could confirm this (Wikipedia, “Ioannovsky Convent”). The honest disposition, per the repository methodology, is that the grave was sealed rather than destroyed, the cult driven underground rather than extinguished, and the physical continuity of the relics is attested by the convent but not independently verified by exhumation.

Moscow 1990: The First Canonization of the New Era

The Local Council of 1990

With the religious liberalization of perestroika, the Russian Orthodox Church could at last do what Metropolitan Anastassy had wished in 1953 — glorify Father John as the whole homeland Church. The occasion was the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church of June 1990, convened immediately after the death of Patriarch Pimen. The Council’s first business was the election of a new primate: on June 7, 1990, it elected Metropolitan Alexy (Ridiger) of Leningrad and Novgorod as Patriarch Alexy II, the first Russian Patriarch of the post-Soviet period (Wikipedia, “1990 Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church”; “Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow”).

The very next day — at noon on June 8, 1990 — the chairman of the Synodal Commission for the Canonization of Saints presented the report on Father John, and on the strength of it the Council issued its act of glorification of the Righteous John of Kronstadt (Wikipedia, “1990 Local Council”; Presidential Library of Russia, “Holy Righteous Father John of Kronstadt”). The repository anchor that ROCOR’s 1964 act preceded Moscow’s by a generation is borne out: the Moscow glorification came twenty-six years after the Church Abroad’s, and days after the election of Alexy II.

The significance

The June 8, 1990 act was the first canonization performed by the Russian Orthodox Church of the new, post-Soviet era — the leading edge of the wave of glorifications (Blessed Xenia in 1988 at the millennium having been among the very last of the Soviet period, the New Martyrs in 2000 the great culmination) by which the homeland Church recovered the saints the atheist state had tried to suppress. That the Council chose Father John as its first new-era saint, and placed his glorification at the threshold of a new patriarchate, gave the act a programmatic weight: the Church was publicly reclaiming the pastor of pre-revolutionary Russia and, with him, the continuity with Holy Russia that the Soviet decades had sought to sever. In this the Moscow act of 1990 answered, from within the homeland, the witness ROCOR had made from exile in 1964.

His Feasts

St. John of Kronstadt is commemorated on two principal days, both keyed to the Julian calendar:

  • December 20 (Old Style) / January 2 (New Style) — the day of his repose (he died on December 20, 1908 O.S. / January 2, 1909 N.S.); this is his chief feast across the Russian Orthodox world (Wikipedia, “John of Kronstadt”; OrthodoxWiki, “John of Kronstadt”).
  • October 19 (Old Style) / November 1 (New Style) — keyed to his nativity (he was born October 19, 1829 O.S.) and coinciding with the date of the 1964 ROCOR glorification (celebrated November 1 N.S.). This day is kept especially in ROCOR, where it doubles as the commemoration of the glorification (OrthodoxWiki, “John of Kronstadt”; rocor.org.au, anniversary of the 1964 canonization).

In addition, the Moscow Patriarchate / OCA tradition keeps a distinct “Glorification of Saint John of Kronstadt” commemoration tied to the June 1990 act (OCA, “Glorification of Saint John of Kronstadt”). The October 19 / November 1 nativity-and-glorification feast is thus verified as a real observance, with its strongest footing in ROCOR practice.

See Also

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