Paris and Brussels

St. John’s eleven years as Archbishop of Western Europe (1951–1962), with his see first in Paris and then in Brussels: the scattered, multinational flock of the Russian Church Abroad across France, Belgium, and the Netherlands; the local-language Orthodox communities he took under his omophorion, including the Dutch Orthodox parishes and the Orthodox Church of France with its restored Gallican rite; his constant travel and his celebration of the Liturgy in Dutch and French as he had in Greek and Chinese; the continued asceticism that made a Paris Catholic priest point to him from the pulpit as a living saint who walks the streets barefoot; and the pastoral testimonies of those who knew him in these years.

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

Archbishop of Western Europe (1951–1962)

In 1951 the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia assigned Archbishop John to the Western European Diocese. “His first see was in Paris, and later it was in Brussels” (orthodoxcanada.ca, “Saint John (Maximovitch)”; en.wikipedia.org, “John of Shanghai and San Francisco,” which dates the assignment to 1951). He held the archdiocese until his transfer to San Francisco in 1962 (see Section 05 — San Francisco).

The flock was utterly unlike Shanghai’s compact refugee colony. It was scattered across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and beyond — the older first-wave Russian emigration, now joined by the Far Eastern refugees he had just helped resettle out of Tubabao, together with a growing number of Western converts to Orthodoxy. He governed it the way he had always governed: by being present. “He travelled constantly throughout Europe,” and the lives describe a bishop perpetually on the road between his dispersed communities (orthodoxcanada.ca). His see-city moved from Paris to Brussels during the period, but his actual ministry was itinerant.

A Multilingual Episcopate

St. John’s catholicity, already shown in Shanghai where he had served “in various languages as needed: Greek, Arabic, Chinese, and later English” (see Bishop of Shanghai), expanded in Europe to the Western tongues of his new flock. “He celebrated the Divine Liturgy in Dutch and French, as before he had served in Greek and Chinese, and as later he was to serve in English” (orthodoxcanada.ca). This was not a gesture but a principle: for St. John the Orthodox faith was not the property of any one nation, and the liturgy belonged in the language of the people who prayed it. The willingness to serve in Dutch and French is the concrete sign in this period of his conviction — worked out also in his restoration of the Western saints (see Western Saints Restoration) — that the West was a proper home for Orthodoxy and not merely a place of Russian exile.

The Dutch Orthodox Parishes and the Hague Monastery

Among the local-language communities St. John took under his protection were the Dutch Orthodox parishes of the Netherlands. “He received under his jurisdiction local Dutch and French Orthodox Churches, protecting them and encouraging their Orthodox development,” and “supported and developed monasteries and parishes in Holland, Belgium, France, and elsewhere” (orthodoxcanada.ca).

The most concrete fruit in the Low Countries was a monastery. In 1954 he established the Monastery of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist at The Hague, formed when he received into Orthodoxy a community of former Benedictine monks from the Roman Catholic Church, led by Abbot Adrian (Akkersdijk) (orthodoxcanada.ca). The detail is significant: it shows him not merely tolerating a Dutch-speaking Orthodoxy but actively gathering Western religious into the Church and giving them a monastic home in their own land. He encouraged the priests of the region to learn the Orthodox saints of their own soil, to find where their relics lay, and to serve them (orthochristian.com/154781.html, “Orthodoxy in the Low Countries”) — the same pastoral instinct that drove his calendar work.

The Orthodox Church of France and the Gallican Rite

The most complex of his Western European labors was his oversight of the Orthodox Church of France, the French-Orthodox movement that had grown out of the work of Eugraph (Evgraf) Kovalevsky and sought to restore an ancient Western, “Gallican,” form of the Orthodox liturgy. St. John “served as the archpastor of the ‘Orthodox Church of France,’ whose restored Gallican liturgy he studied and then celebrated” (orthodoxcanada.ca). On October 29, 1959, the ROCOR Synod of Bishops permitted Archbishop John to accept the French Orthodox community under his protection while preserving its Western rite, subject to conditions — chief among them strict adherence to the Orthodox Paschalion (rocorstudies.org, “On the Western Liturgical Tradition,” citing the Synod’s decrees). The movement was subsequently given the name Orthodox Catholic Church of France (later widely known by the French acronym ECOF), and a Synodal commission was tasked with verifying the authenticity of the Gallican Liturgy it used (rocorstudies.org; en.wikipedia.org).

St. John gave the movement episcopal continuity: he “was the principal consecrator of the Orthodox Church of France’s first modern bishop, Jean-Nectaire (Kovalevsky) of Saint-Denis,” and he ordained to the priesthood the man who would become its second bishop, Germain (Bertrand-Hardy) (orthodoxcanada.ca).

This is a topic to handle carefully and factually. St. John’s support for the French movement was real and is well documented; so is the fact that the ROCOR Synod hedged it with conditions and reservations, and that the question of Eugraph Kovalevsky’s own episcopal consecration was repeatedly “left open” by the Synod pending the fulfillment of those conditions (rocorstudies.org). The later history of ECOF — after St. John’s repose in 1966 — moved through controversy and eventual separation from canonical Orthodox jurisdictions; that subsequent history is not St. John’s act and is not laid to his account here. What the period establishes is that St. John, true to his vision of a genuinely Western Orthodoxy, took a fragile Western-rite community under his wing, studied and celebrated its liturgy, gave it a bishop, and bound it to the Orthodox Paschalion — and that he did so within, not against, the conciliar discipline of his Synod. (The distinct question of his restoration of veneration of Western saints, as opposed to Western-rite liturgy, is treated separately in Western Saints Restoration.)

“A Saint Walks the Streets Barefoot”

It was in these Paris years that St. John’s reputation for holiness broke out of the Russian community into the surrounding Catholic world. He continued the asceticism of Shanghai without relaxation — wearing the cheapest cloth, eating once a day, and going barefoot, “sometimes having given his sandals away to some poor man” (pravmir.com, “A Living Proof of the Burning Faith”). The most famous testimony to this period is the remark of a Catholic priest in Paris, who, the lives record, sought to rouse his young parishioners with these words:

“You demand proofs, you say that now there are neither miracles nor saints. Why should I give you theoretical proofs, when today there walks in the streets of Paris a saint — Saint Jean Nu-Pieds (St. John the Barefoot).” (pravmir.com, “A Living Proof of the Burning Faith”; the saying is consistently placed by the lives in the Western European period, when “Vladika was sent to Western Europe and his reputation for holiness spread — and not only among the Orthodox.”)

The repository places this remark in the Paris period for the reason the sources themselves give: the priest’s “St. Jean Nu-Pieds” / “St. John the Barefoot” is a Parisian appellation, attached to St. John’s walking barefoot through Paris and, the accounts add, even on the hard gravel of the park at Versailles (pravmir.com; iconandlight.wordpress.com). The Shanghai files of this compendium note this placement; the barefoot epithet as a Parisian phenomenon belongs here, even though the underlying practice of going barefoot ran through his whole life.

Pastoral Testimonies

The witnesses of the European years describe the same figure the Shanghai and San Francisco accounts give: a bishop of disconcerting unworldliness whose holiness was self-evident to those who met him. Many of the testimonies later gathered by Archpriest Peter Perekrestov in Man of God come from people who knew him in Paris and Brussels — clergy he ordained, families he visited, the sick he prayed over. The accounts of the period repeat the now-familiar marks of his rule: the daily Liturgy served without abbreviation; the long hours of prayer after it; the refusal of comfort for himself; and the readiness to appear at any hour where a sick man or a troubled family needed him. Among the children he had brought out of the Far East and the converts drawn to Orthodoxy in the West, he was the same pastor he had been in Shanghai — only now his flock was strewn across half a continent, and he wore himself out crossing it. The Western European period is also when his fame as a wonderworker reached non-Orthodox Christians, the Parisian priest’s pulpit reference being the most cited instance. As always, the lives are careful to present these as the testimony of named or identifiable witnesses rather than as adjudicated history; the consistent picture they yield is of a man whose ascetic severity toward himself was matched by an inexhaustible tenderness toward everyone else. From Brussels he was transferred in 1962 to the new Archdiocese of Western America and San Francisco — the final chapter of his life, and the one that would bring both the cathedral controversy and his repose (see Section 05 — San Francisco).

References

Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint John (Maximovitch).” orthodoxcanada.ca. (Assignment 1951, see in Paris then Brussels; constant travel; Liturgy in Dutch and French; reception of local Dutch and French Orthodox Churches; The Hague monastery of 1954 with Benedictine monks under Abbot Adrian Akkersdijk; archpastorate of the Orthodox Church of France and its Gallican rite; consecration of Jean-Nectaire Kovalevsky and ordination of Germain Bertrand-Hardy.)
“John of Shanghai and San Francisco.” en.wikipedia.org. (Assignment to the Archdiocese of Western Europe in 1951, see first in Paris then Brussels.)
“On the Western Liturgical Tradition.” rocorstudies.org, June 16, 2013. (The Synod of Bishops’ decree of October 29, 1959 permitting Archbishop John to accept the French Orthodox community with the Western rite, subject to the Orthodox Paschalion; the commission to verify the Gallican Liturgy; Eugraph Kovalevsky’s consecration repeatedly left open.)
“A Living Proof of the Burning Faith: On St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco.” pravmir.com. (The Paris Catholic priest’s pulpit remark, “Saint Jean Nu-Pieds / St. John the Barefoot,” dated to his being sent to Western Europe in 1951; his cheap clothing and barefoot walking, giving his sandals to the poor.)
“Orthodoxy in the Low Countries. Part 6–8.” orthochristian.com/154781.html. (His insistence that the priests under him learn and serve the local Orthodox saints of their region; the Low Countries context.)
Perekrestov, Archpriest Peter (ed.). Man of God: Saint John of Shanghai & San Francisco. San Francisco: Holy Virgin Cathedral, 1994/2015. (The anthology of witness testimonies, including the European years.)