Orphanage and Pastoral Care

The works of mercy at the heart of St. John’s Shanghai years: the orphanage he founded under the protection of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, which from a beginning of eight children sheltered hundreds and, over its life, some thousands; his personal gathering of sick and starving children from the streets and slums; his ministry to the sick, the dying, the mentally ill, and the imprisoned; his barefoot almsgiving and self-neglect; and the reputation for sanctity that reached even the non-Orthodox — reported, where the sources allow, through their named witnesses.

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

The St. Tikhon of Zadonsk Orphanage

Shortly after his arrival, St. John founded a home for orphans and for the children of indigent and needy parents, placed under the heavenly protection of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk (Mileant, Life and Miracles, orthochristian.com/54575.html, which records that “he organized a home for orphans and the children of needy parents… under the protection of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk”). The founding is conventionally dated to 1935, shortly after his late-1934 arrival; Fr. Herman (Podmoshensky) recalls that upon arriving “he rented a house and opened up a hostel for orphans” (orthochristian.com/71942.html). The “1935” year is the standard tradition rather than a phrase printed in Mileant.

How Many Children

The number of children the orphanage served is one of the genuinely disputed figures in the saint’s life. Mileant’s life — the most widely reproduced English account — states that the orphanage “began with eight children… later housed up to a hundred children at one time, and some 1,500 in all” (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). The Vita Prima, sharing the identical sentence structure, gives instead “some 3,500 in all”; Fr. Herman likewise recalls “over three thousand who went through the orphanage,” and the Canadian Orthodox History Project says it “grew to 3,500” (Vita Prima, stjohnofshanghaibelfast.org; orthochristian.com/71942.html; orthodoxcanada.ca) [Disputed: the total served is given as ~1,500 by Mileant and as ~3,000–3,500 by the Vita Prima, Fr. Herman (Podmoshensky), and orthodoxcanada.ca — the same sentence appears with both figures, indicating a textual-transmission discrepancy; the higher “~8,000” sometimes cited is not found in the authoritative lives]. What all sources agree on is the shape: a beginning of eight children, up to a hundred at any one time, and a total numbering in the thousands across the orphanage’s roughly fifteen years — the whole of which was evacuated intact in 1949 (see Tubabao Refugee Camp).

Gathering Children from the Streets

The orphanage was filled by the bishop’s own hands. “Vladyka himself gathered sick and starving children off the streets and dark alleys of Shanghai’s slums,” the lives record (Vita Prima, stjohnofshanghaibelfast.org; Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html; orthodoxcanada.ca: “Vladyka John personally gathered abandoned, sick and starving children from the streets”).

The most arresting of these rescues are preserved as the eyewitness testimony of Mrs. Maria Alexandrovna Shakhmatova, the orphanage matron, recorded by Fr. Herman (Podmoshensky). When the Shanghai newspapers reported that dogs were devouring infant girls thrown into garbage cans, St. John told Mrs. Shakhmatova to buy Chinese vodka; with a bottle pressed into the hands of the drunkard guarding a garbage can, the abandoned infant inside was bought free and saved. “They say that that night he returned to the orphanage with two babies under his arms” (Shakhmatova, as recorded by Fr. Herman, orthochristian.com/71942.html). In another of her accounts, he directed her to retrieve a nine-year-old boy from “a hotel of prostitution” — a child who later became a seminarian who, the account adds, set the Philokalia in type (Shakhmatova, via Fr. Herman, orthochristian.com/71942.html). These are named-witness hagiographic accounts, attested by Mrs. Shakhmatova and transmitted through Fr. Herman; they do not appear in Mileant’s core life and are reported here as her testimony.

The detail that the bishop himself walked the alleys at the dead of night to collect such children — rather than merely funding the work — is what gives these accounts their force. He did not delegate his mercy. Mrs. Shakhmatova’s testimony repeatedly shows him as the one who learned of a perishing child and went, or sent her at once, to fetch it: the cathedral-building bishop, the diocesan administrator, the daily celebrant of the Liturgy, was also the man crouched over a garbage can in the Shanghai night. The lives present this not as eccentricity but as the literal practice of the Gospel’s identification of Christ with “the least of these.”

The Sick, the Dying, and the Mentally Ill

He visited the city’s hospitals daily, seeking out both Orthodox and non-Orthodox patients, hearing confessions and bringing Communion “at any hour,” and attending the dying through the night (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html; orthochristian.com/71942.html). The lives lay particular weight on the night hours: when a patient was reported to be in danger, the bishop would come — through curfew, in any weather — and pray at the bedside, sometimes for hours, until the crisis passed or the soul departed. This nightly visiting, which continued through the years of Japanese occupation (see Bishop of Shanghai), is among the most consistently attested features of his Shanghai ministry.

Among the most remembered of these ministries was his care for the mentally ill. Mileant’s life records: “Outside Shanghai there was a mental hospital, and Vladyka alone had the spiritual power to visit these terribly sick people. He gave them Holy Communion, and they, surprisingly, received it peacefully and listened to him” (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). The calm reception of the Mysteries by the disturbed is the documented detail; the lives consulted name no attending doctor for the episode, so it is reported as the lives transmit it. That those whom no one else could approach grew quiet in his presence is offered by the sources as a sign of the spiritual authority his contemporaries already perceived in him during his lifetime.

The Imprisoned

His pastoral round included the prison. The lives record that “Vladyka visited the prison… and celebrated the Divine Liturgy for the convicts on a primitive little table” (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html; the same wording appears in the Vita Prima and orthodoxcanada.ca). This is presented in the sources as a settled feature of his ministry. The image is characteristic: where the institutional Church might have sent a chaplain, the ruling bishop himself came, vested, to serve the Mysteries for the imprisoned on whatever makeshift altar the cell afforded — the same readiness to go in person, to the places others avoided, that marked his work among the children, the sick, and the insane.

Barefoot Almsgiving and Self-Neglect

His care for others was matched by a total disregard for himself. He wore the cheapest Chinese fabric and “soft slippers or sandals, always without socks,” and “often went barefoot, sometimes after having given his sandals away to some poor man” — serving barefoot at the altar at times, despite the criticism it drew (Vita Prima, stjohnofshanghaibelfast.org; Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). The discipline of sleeplessness begun at his tonsure continued: “he was known not to have slept in a bed for forty years,” 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” (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). Fr. Herman adds that “he would never lie down to sleep; he never even allowed himself to lean on the back of a chair” (orthochristian.com/71942.html). For the ascetic life under the open sky, the orphanage matron is again the witness: Mrs. Shakhmatova described seeing him in “deep, concentrated prayer, freezing, shivering in the open air” on the belfry on winter nights (Shakhmatova, via Fr. Herman, orthochristian.com/71942.html).

Reputation Among the Non-Orthodox

His evident sanctity reached beyond the Orthodox community, and even beyond Shanghai. The famous testimony of a Roman Catholic preacher that a living saint walked the streets barefoot is well attested — but it belongs to his later Western European years in Paris, not to Shanghai. Mileant’s life records: “In one of the Catholic churches of Paris, a priest strove to inspire his young people with these words: ‘You demand proof, you say that now there are neither miracles nor saints. Why should I give you theoretical proof, when today there walks in the streets of Paris a saint — Saint Jean Nus Pieds [Saint John the Barefoot]’” (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). The speaker is the Catholic priest, addressing his young congregation in Paris; the line is sometimes misquoted as if spoken by St. John himself, and is sometimes mislocated to Shanghai — both errors are noted here so that the testimony may be filed where it belongs, with his Western European ministry [Disputed: this “saint walks the streets of Paris barefoot” testimony is frequently attributed to the Shanghai period or placed in St. John’s own mouth; the standard life (Mileant) sets it in Paris and gives a Catholic priest as the speaker].

What the Shanghai sources do attest of his standing among the non-Orthodox is more local and concrete: in the hospitals he sought out and prayed over the non-Orthodox sick alongside the Orthodox (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html), and his charity made no distinction of background — a catholicity of mercy that, with the multilingual Liturgy described in Bishop of Shanghai, marked his entire ministry in the Far East. The children he gathered were of every nationality the Shanghai streets threw up; the sick he visited were sought out “whether Orthodox or not”; and his evident holiness, indifferent to the boundaries that usually divide a cosmopolitan port city, was perceived across them. The Paris testimony, for all that it belongs to a later chapter, only put into words what Shanghai had already learned: that in this barefoot bishop the world was looking at a saint.

These works of mercy — the orphanage, the hospitals, the prison, the almsgiving — are not incidental to St. John’s sanctity but are its very substance as his contemporaries encountered it. Before he was a wonderworker, before the accounts of clairvoyance and healing gathered around his name, he was the bishop who fed the hungry, sheltered the orphan, visited the prisoner, and gave away his own shoes. The Shanghai years thus furnish the concrete moral ground on which the later veneration would build, and to which the named witnesses — Mrs. Shakhmatova foremost among them — bore testimony for the rest of their lives.

See Also

References

  • Mileant, Bishop Alexander. The Life and Miracles of St. John (Maximovitch). orthochristian.com/54575.html. (Orphanage under St. Tikhon of Zadonsk; “began with eight… some 1,500 in all”; gathering children from the streets; the mental-hospital visits; the prison Liturgy; barefoot and sandal-giving; not sleeping in a bed for forty years; the Paris “Saint Jean Nus Pieds” testimony of the Catholic priest.)
  • Vita Prima of St. John the Wonderworker. stjohnofshanghaibelfast.org. (The “~3,500 in all” figure; “gathered sick and starving children off the streets and dark alleys”; the barefoot serving.)
  • Fr. Herman (Podmoshensky). “The Price of Sanctity.” orthochristian.com/71942.html. (The hostel opened on arrival; “over three thousand”; the named-witness accounts of Mrs. Maria Alexandrovna Shakhmatova — the vodka-and-garbage-can rescue, the brothel rescue, and the belfry-prayer testimony; “never even allowed himself to lean on the back of a chair.”)
  • Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint John (Maximovitch).” orthodoxcanada.ca. (Orphanage “grew to 3,500”; personal gathering of abandoned children.)
  • Perekrestov, Archpriest Peter (ed.). Man of God: Saint John of Shanghai & San Francisco. San Francisco: Holy Virgin Cathedral / Nikodemos, 1994/2015. (The collected anthology of named witness testimonies to his Shanghai charity.)
  • Rose, Fr. Seraphim, and Abbot Herman (Podmoshensky). Blessed John the Wonderworker. 3rd rev. ed. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1987.