Wonderworking Accounts

The healings, clairvoyance, and miraculous appearances attributed to St. John in life and after his repose, each pinned — as the sources allow — to the named witness who attests it: the best-documented Shanghai healings (the Sadkovskaya skull fracture, with hospital records cited); the clairvoyant knowing of strangers and of the hour of death; the Paris-period cases; the bilocation and appearance-at-a-distance reports, labeled honestly as the most extraordinary and least independently documentable class; and the posthumous miracles gathered by the 1993–94 glorification process. Reported in the discipline of this collection as the testimonies the sources preserve, named and dated where they allow, and never advanced as independently verified events.

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

A Note on the Sources and Their Discipline

The wonderworking attributed to St. John is preserved almost entirely in hagiographic compilations: the Vita Prima of Fr. Seraphim Rose and Abbot Herman (Blessed John the Wonderworker), Bishop Alexander (Mileant)’s widely reproduced Life, and above all the witness anthology gathered by Archpriest Peter Perekrestov as Man of God (also Vladyka John: The Man of God). These accounts are internally attributed to named witnesses, but they are not, except where a hospital archive is expressly cited, independently documented in the journalistic or medical sense. In keeping with this collection’s discipline (per METHODOLOGY §3.5), each account below is reported as the testimony of the person who attests it, named where the sources name him, and is not asserted as proven fact. Where a witness is given only by initials, or where an account rests on collective and anonymous report, that is noted.

Healings

The Sadkovskaya skull fracture (Shanghai) — the best-documented case. A woman, L. D. Sadkovskaya, was thrown from a horse and suffered a skull fracture, with bone fragments pressing on the brain; a council of doctors pronounced her case hopeless. St. John came and prayed alone in the room for some two hours; her condition stabilized, the surgery that followed succeeded, she regained consciousness and recovered fully, living many years afterward. This case carries the strongest documentary anchor in the corpus: it is attested by the patient herself, related by her thirty-year friend N. Makovaya, and the Shanghai County Hospital records are cited as documentation (Vita Prima; Perekrestov, Man of God).

The Shanghai mental hospital. Mileant’s life records that of the patients in the psychiatric hospital outside Shanghai, “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,” and they “looked forward to his visits” (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html; see Orphanage and Pastoral Care). This is a collective testimony: the calm reception of the Mysteries by the disturbed is the attested phenomenon, but no individual patient is named.

The brother of V. D. (Paris). A man unknown to St. John lay in a Paris hospital with a critical skull fracture; the Archbishop “somehow found him in the hospital, prayed over him and gave him Communion,” and follow-up X-rays were said to show no fracture. The witness is V. D., the patient’s sister; the account is reported under her initials, and the radiological claim is not independently verifiable (Vita Prima).

Other named healing testimonies. The corpus preserves several further cases under partial names: Xenia Yarovoy of Los Angeles, whose painful hand healed after she wrote to St. John (attested by her sister Anna Hodyriva); a young woman, “Musia,” gravely injured in a car accident with a punctured lung, who recovered after the Archbishop prayed at her bedside (attested by her sister Anna S.); and the husband of Mrs. L. Liu, injured in a San Francisco auto accident in 1963, who recovered after St. John’s visit (attested by Mrs. Liu and the driver Mr. B. T. — see below). Each is reported here as the testimony of the named relative who preserved it.

Clairvoyance

St. John was widely held to know what he had no natural means of knowing — the names and circumstances of strangers, the thoughts and sins of those who came to him, the hour of death. The lives summarize this generally (he “knew people’s thoughts before they spoke,” “appeared where needed”); the pinned cases are these:

Recognizing the unseen correspondent. Lidia Liu of Hong Kong, who had written to St. John but never met him, reported that on first sight “Vladika turned to me and said, ‘It is you who wrote me the letter!’ I was astonished, since Vladika had never seen me before” (Lidia Liu, Vita Prima; Perekrestov, Man of God). The Liu family also reported seeing “a light surrounding Vladika … a radiance around him a foot wide” at the lectern — attested by Lidia Liu, her mother, and her husband, a multiple- but single-family witness (Vita Prima).

The hospital Communion prophecy (Shanghai). Visiting a hospital, St. John insisted on giving Communion to a healthy-looking young harmonica player due for discharge, in preference to a gravely ill patient, saying the young man “will die tonight, and the other, who is seriously ill, will live many years.” The young man died that night and the sick man recovered. The witness here is the accompanying priest, who is not named in the online text, so the account is reported with that gap noted (Vita Prima).

Recognizing the sister with the healed hand. When Xenia Yarovoy’s sister came to the cathedral, St. John — who had never met her — asked her on first sight, “How is your hand?”, knowing both the sister and the ailment he had not been told of (attested by Anna Hodyriva, Vita Prima).

The Paris Period

The Western European years supply several of the cases above (V. D.’s brother) and the famous “Saint Jean Nus Pieds” testimony of the Catholic preacher, which belongs properly to asceticism rather than wonderworking (see Ascetic Practice). The Paris period also furnishes the principal bilocation account, treated below. What the Paris cases share is the pattern of the Shanghai ones: St. John finding the sick he had no way of knowing about, in hospitals where he was a stranger, and the recovery following his prayer and Communion.

Bilocation and Appearance at a Distance

This is the most extraordinary class of account and, by the same token, the least independently documentable, and it is labeled as such here. These are reports of St. John appearing where he was not bodily present, or arriving with a foreknowledge that bent his movements — and they rest, characteristically, on a single principal witness, sometimes with one unnamed corroborator.

Anna Petrovna Lushnikova (France, 1945) — the classic account. Gravely wounded and lying in a French hospital locked for the night during a storm, she repeatedly called on St. John, who was then in France but not present. The account states that “around eleven o’clock in the evening, Vladika appeared in the ward,” prayed, and gave her Communion, after which she slept calmly; a detail offered in corroboration is that a banknote of the exact denomination he used to pay for her lessons was found under her pillow, and that a ward neighbor reportedly confirmed seeing him. The principal and effectively sole named witness is Anna Petrovna Lushnikova herself; the corroborating neighbor is unnamed. This is reported here as an alleged miraculous appearance resting on a single principal witness — the report class named honestly (Vita Prima; Perekrestov, Man of God).

The Liu drive (San Francisco, 1963). En route to the airport with the driver Mr. B. T., St. John abruptly directed the car to the Liu home over the driver’s protest that he would miss his plane, saying, “Can you take the life of a man upon yourself?”; the visit preceded the crisis and recovery of Mr. Liu, and the account adds that “Vladika was not late for the plane, because they had held it up for him.” This is foreknowledge and providential timing rather than bilocation proper, and it has two named witnesses — Mrs. Liu and the driver Mr. B. T. (Vita Prima; Perekrestov, Man of God).

Foreknowledge of His Own Death

St. John was reported to have foreknown the time and place of his death, telling those near him that he would die soon, “at the end of June — not in San Francisco, but in Seattle,” and, the evening before departing on the journey that ended in Seattle, “You will not kiss my hand again.” The principal witness was a woman who had known him twelve years, whose testimony Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky) judged “worthy of complete confidence”; the orphanage manager Mrs. M. A. Shakhmatova attests a related saying (Vita Prima). This foreknowledge is treated more fully in Repose and Relics, where the circumstances of his death are described; it is reported there and here as the attestation of the lives, not as documented fact (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Posthumous Miracles and the Glorification Process

After his burial in the crypt beneath his cathedral, veneration of St. John grew as a grassroots movement: the faithful came to the tomb, first praying for the reposed Archbishop and then to him, leaving lists of names, and reporting answered prayers — the documentary substratum on which the glorification was built (Perekrestov, “The Opening of the Relics, and Glorification of St. John Maximovitch,” orthochristian.com/80365.html; the full narrative is in Repose and Relics). The cause advanced under ROCOR, the relics were examined and found incorrupt on October 13, 1993, and the glorification followed on July 2, 1994. The testimonies of intercession were gathered and published — Fr. Valery Lukianov’s A Lantern of Grace documented glorification-period wonders, and successive editions of the lives collected the cases.

The named posthumous accounts include: Victor Boyton, who reported that a friend with blood cancer, going blind, recovered his sight after Boyton prayed daily before St. John’s photograph (attested by Victor Boyton); the Vietnamese Kim En (baptized Kyra), who was consoled in dreams by “a certain monk” she later recognized from St. John’s photograph (attested by Archpriest Stephan Pavlenko); and four healings in Astrakhan in 1994–95 through anointing with oil from St. John’s lampada — a vanished breast tumor, a swelling gone from an altar boy’s hand, ulcerous leg growths healed overnight, a convulsive cough stilled (documented by Hieromonk Cyril Osipov). At the very opening of the relics in 1993, a sick boy, the son of a diocesan priest, is said to have touched the relics and become well (Perekrestov, orthochristian.com/80365.html). Pre-glorification visions of the saint “all in light” were reported by his former student Fr. Amvrosy P., his longtime deacon Fr. Constantine Z., and the orphanage manager Mrs. M. A. Shakhmatova, who saw him say, “Tell the people: although I have died, I am alive!” (Vita Prima).

These posthumous accounts are reported, as the antemortem ones are, as the testimonies the sources preserve — named and dated where they allow — and not as independently verified events. The Church’s reception of St. John’s holiness is a theological act; this collection records the witnesses and does not certify the physical miracles. The continuation of such reports at the open shrine since 1994 is treated in Repose and Relics.

References

Rose, Fr. Seraphim, and Abbot Herman (Podmoshensky). Blessed John the Wonderworker. 3rd rev. ed. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1987 (the Vita Prima). (The Sadkovskaya skull fracture with N. Makovaya and the hospital records; V. D.‘s brother in Paris; Xenia Yarovoy and Anna Hodyriva; “Musia” and Anna S.; Lidia Liu’s recognition and the radiance; the hospital Communion prophecy; the Lushnikova bilocation account; the Liu drive with Mr. B. T.; the foreknowledge of death and Metropolitan Philaret’s judgment; the visions of Fr. Amvrosy P., Fr. Constantine Z., and Mrs. Shakhmatova.)
Mileant, Bishop Alexander. The Life and Miracles of St. John (Maximovitch). orthochristian.com/54575.html. (The Shanghai mental-hospital ministry; the general attestation of his clairvoyance and healings.)
Perekrestov, Archpriest Peter. “The Opening of the Relics, and Glorification of St. John Maximovitch.” orthochristian.com/80365.html. (The grassroots growth of veneration at the tomb; the October 13, 1993 opening of the incorrupt relics; the boy healed at the relics; the July 2, 1994 glorification.)
Perekrestov, Archpriest Peter (ed.). Man of God: Saint John of Shanghai & San Francisco (also Vladyka John: The Man of God). San Francisco: Holy Virgin Cathedral / Nikodemos, 1994/2015. (The collected anthology of named witness testimonies of healing, clairvoyance, and posthumous miracle — Victor Boyton, Kim En/Kyra via Fr. Stephan Pavlenko, the Astrakhan healings via Hieromonk Cyril Osipov, and the rest.)