Belgrade and Tonsure

The Serbian formation of St. John of Shanghai: his theological degree from the University of Belgrade (1925); his tonsure as a monk in 1926 by Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky) at Milkovo Monastery, taking the name John after his kinsman St. John of Tobolsk; his ordination and his years teaching at the Bitola seminary (1929–1934) under St. Nikolai Velimirovich, where his sanctity and asceticism first became widely known; and his consecration as Bishop of Shanghai on May 28, 1934 — the last episcopal consecration in which Metropolitan Antony took part.

Tradition: ROCOR (glorified 1994; Moscow Patriarchate veneration affirmed 2008)

Theological Studies in Belgrade (to 1925)

In Belgrade the refugee law graduate turned to theology. Michael Maximovitch completed the Faculty of Theology of the University of Belgrade in 1925, having been ordained a reader in 1924 in the Russian church in Belgrade by Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky) (Mileant, Life and Miracles, orthochristian.com/54575.html; the 1925 graduation is given consistently by Mileant, OCA, and the Canadian Orthodox History Project).

His poverty in these years was real, and the lives preserve a vivid emblem of it: “While he was a student he worked for his living by selling newspapers” (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). The picture is characteristic of the man — a future archbishop, formed in destitution, indifferent to comfort and to his own appearance from the start.

The Faculty of Theology of the University of Belgrade, which had been organized in part by the Russian émigré theologians who flooded into Serbia, was among the principal Orthodox theological schools of the inter-war years, and it placed John squarely within the intellectual orbit of the Russian Church Abroad. He emerged from it not as a careerist scholar but as a man whose learning was wholly in the service of prayer — the same ordering of priorities the lives had noted in his Kharkov years, when he read the saints’ lives in preference to his law lectures (see Early Life and Family).

Monastic Tonsure (1926)

In 1926, Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky) tonsured Michael a monk at the Milkovo (Miljkov) Monastery in Serbia, giving him the name John, after his own kinsman, St. John (Maximovitch) of Tobolsk. Mileant’s life states it directly: “In 1926 Metropolitan Anthony tonsured him a monk and ordained him hierodeacon in the Milkov Monastery, giving him the name John, after the future archbishop’s own distant relative, Saint John (Maximovitch) of Tobolsk” (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). The naming closed a circle begun in childhood: the family tradition of kinship with the Tobolsk wonderworker (see Early Life and Family) was now sealed in his monastic name.

He was ordained hierodeacon in 1926 in the same act, and hieromonk (priest) on November 21, 1926 (OCA and OrthodoxWiki specify the ordaining bishop as Bishop Gabriel (Chepur) of Chelyabinsk — a detail given by those sources rather than the Mileant text). From the moment of his tonsure, by the witness of those who knew him, he ceased to sleep lying down — a discipline he is said to have kept for the rest of his life (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html; see below and Orphanage and Pastoral Care).

Milkovo (Miljkov) Monastery, where the tonsure took place, was at this period a center of Russian monastic life in Serbia, gathering émigré monks under the eldership of the renowned Schema-Archimandrite Ambrose (Kurganov), and its disciplined ascetic atmosphere left its mark. A ROCOR delegation in recent years confirmed Miljkov as the site of the 1926 tonsure (orthochristian.com/160786.html). The young hieromonk’s name, drawn from the missionary metropolitan of Tobolsk, and his formation in this strict Russian-Serbian monastery together pointed toward the life he would lead: rigorous in self-denial, expansive in mercy, oriented from the start toward service at the edges of the Orthodox world.

Teaching at Bitola (1929–1934)

From 1929 to 1934, Hieromonk John served as an instructor of theology at the Serbian seminary of St. John the Theologian in Bitola (Bitolj), in what is now North Macedonia (the 1929 appointment was made by the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church; orthodoxcanada.ca; Wikipedia, used as a locator). The rector of the region — and the seminary’s guiding presence — was Bishop Nikolai (Velimirovich) of Ohrid and Žiča, himself later glorified as a saint. The encounter of these two future saints is one of the well-attested moments of John’s early life.

The Bitola seminary trained candidates for the Serbian priesthood, and John taught them — in Serbian — pastoral theology and the history of the Church. The position placed him in daily contact with young men at the formative edge of their own vocations, and it is to their watchful presence that we owe the first public account of the inner life he had until then concealed. A teacher is observed by his students at all hours; and what these students observed, when they began to attend to their unusual instructor, was sanctity. Two testimonies in particular have come down to us: the word of the bishop who knew him, and the discovery made by the seminarians themselves.

The Velimirovich Testimony

St. Nikolai Velimirovich is reported to have said of the young hieromonk words that became famous: “If you wish to see a living saint, go to Bitol [Bitola] to Father John.” This is the attested wording in the standard lives (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html; Rose and Podmoshensky, Blessed John the Wonderworker). It is a remark transmitted as something Bishop Nikolai “was heard to say” rather than a dated, documented utterance — a hagiographic attestation pinned to a named witness (Bishop Nikolai), not an external record. The often-encountered phrase “an angel of God” or “man of God” is not the attested form of this Bitola remark; “Man of God” is the title of Archpriest Peter Perekrestov’s later anthology and should not be conflated with Velimirovich’s “living saint” line.

The Students’ Testimony to His Asceticism

It was at Bitola that John’s hidden ascetic life first became publicly known, through the observation of his students at the seminary. By their account, “he scarcely slept at all, and never in a bed, allowing himself only an hour or two each night of uncomfortable rest in a sitting position, or bent over on the floor praying before icons” (Rose and Podmoshensky, Blessed John the Wonderworker; Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). The same students discovered his nighttime care for them: “he would go through the dormitories at night and pick up blankets that had fallen down and cover the unsuspecting sleepers, making the Sign of the Cross over them” (Rose and Podmoshensky, Blessed John the Wonderworker). These accounts are pinned to the seminarians collectively; the standard published lives do not name individual Bitola students for them, so they are reported here as the attested testimony of his pupils rather than as the word of a single named witness.

The two strands of his future ministry are already visible in these seminary accounts: the extreme self-denial, hidden as far as it could be hidden, and the tender, practical care for those in his charge — the same combination that would later send him barefoot through Shanghai to gather abandoned children. The students loved him; and they understood, as the young often do, that they were in the presence of something they had only read about in the lives of the saints. It is this recognition, gathering around him at Bitola, that the consecration of 1934 would carry into the episcopate.

Consecration as Bishop of Shanghai (1934)

In 1934 the Russian Church Abroad resolved to send a bishop to its diocese in Shanghai, where some fifty thousand Russian refugees were without a settled hierarch after the repose of Archbishop Simon in 1933. The choice fell on Hieromonk John.

He was consecrated Bishop of Shanghai on May 28, 1934, in Belgrade, with Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky) as principal consecrator (Rose and Podmoshensky, Blessed John the Wonderworker; Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html; OCA) [Disputed: the dominant date in the lives is May 28, 1934 (Mileant, Rose, OCA, OrthodoxWiki); orthodoxcanada.ca gives “3 June 1934” — the two are presented here with May 28 as primary]. Bishop Nikolai (Velimirovich) was among the Serbian hierarchs present; the full roster of co-consecrating bishops is not itemized in the standard published lives.

This was, the lives emphasize, the last episcopal consecration in which Metropolitan Antony participated — “Vladika was the last bishop of the very many to be consecrated by Metropolitan Anthony,” as the biography puts it (Rose and Podmoshensky, Blessed John the Wonderworker; orthodoxcanada.ca echoes the point, calling him “the last and greatest” of the bishops Antony consecrated). The relationship that had begun with a Kharkov archbishop befriending a pious student thus reached its consummation in the laying-on of hands. There is a fittingness the biographers do not fail to note: the great first-hierarch of the Church Abroad, near the end of his own life, set the seal of the episcopate on the man who would become the Church Abroad’s most venerated saint.

The lives also preserve the story of his reluctance. According to an account attributed to “a lady who knew him,” John, encountered on a Belgrade streetcar, said that he had been summoned by mistake in place of another Hieromonk John who was to be made bishop — only to learn the next day that it was indeed he whom the Church wished to consecrate (Rose and Podmoshensky, Blessed John the Wonderworker). When he protested that he had a defect of speech and could not enunciate clearly, he was answered that “the Prophet Moses had the same difficulty” (Rose and Podmoshensky, Blessed John the Wonderworker). This streetcar account is attributed to an unnamed witness and is reported here as the tradition the lives transmit.

Late in 1934 the new bishop set out for the Far East. The man whom his students had called a living saint, and whom Velimirovich had named one, would now spend fifteen years pouring himself out for the Russian refugees of China — the subject of Bishop of Shanghai.

References

Mileant, Bishop Alexander. The Life and Miracles of St. John (Maximovitch), Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco. orthochristian.com/54575.html. (Belgrade theology degree 1925; selling newspapers; reader 1924; tonsure and hierodiaconate 1926 at Milkovo by Met. Antony; the name John after St. John of Tobolsk; the “living saint” remark of Velimirovich; the never-in-a-bed asceticism; consecration May 28, 1934.)
Rose, Fr. Seraphim, and Abbot Herman (Podmoshensky). Blessed John the Wonderworker. 3rd rev. ed. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1987. (The students’ testimony to his sleeplessness and nighttime care; the “living saint” remark; the streetcar/refusal and “Prophet Moses” exchange; the last consecration by Metropolitan Antony.)
Orthodox Church in America. “Saint John (Maximovitch), Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco.” oca.org. (Hieromonk November 21, 1926; Bishop Gabriel (Chepur) of Chelyabinsk as ordainer; consecration May 28, 1934; Met. Antony principal consecrator.)
Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint John (Maximovitch).” orthodoxcanada.ca. (Bitola 1929–1934; the variant date “3 June 1934”; “the last and greatest” of Antony’s bishops; Bp. Nikolai present.)
Perekrestov, Archpriest Peter (ed.). Man of God: Saint John of Shanghai & San Francisco. San Francisco: Holy Virgin Cathedral / Nikodemos, 1994/2015.
“John (Maximovitch) the Wonderworker.” OrthodoxWiki; “John of Shanghai and San Francisco.” Wikipedia. (Used only as locators for the 1929 Serbian-Synod appointment to Bitola and the November 21, 1926 priestly ordination.)