St. John’s Place in ROCOR

St. John Maximovitch was a hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia from his consecration in 1934 to his repose in 1966, formed by Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) and faithful to ROCOR’s canonical path throughout his life. Yet within that loyalty he embodied an outward-facing, missionary vision — recovering the pre-Schism Western saints, serving alongside Greeks and Serbs, fostering the French and Dutch Orthodox missions, and recognizing grace beyond his own jurisdiction. He nominated the junior Bishop Philaret to break the 1964 deadlock over the ROCOR primacy, endured an opposition that helped fuel the San Francisco trial, and is today claimed both by ROCOR traditionalists and by the broader Orthodox world.

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

Formation Under Metropolitan Anthony

St. John belonged to the founding generation of ROCOR by direct discipleship. Émigré to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes after the Revolution, he studied at the theological faculty of Belgrade University and was tonsured a monk and ordained in the Serbian lands, taking the name John in honor of his ancestor St. John of Tobolsk. His formative years thus fell within the Karlovci-centered Russian Church Abroad, whose synod sat at Sremski Karlovci in Yugoslavia, and within the Serbian Church that hosted it — a double inheritance, Russian and Serbian, that left a permanent mark on his sense of the Church as wider than any one nation. He came under the formative influence of Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), the first First Hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad, who consecrated him Bishop of Shanghai on May 28, 1934 — the last of the many bishops Metropolitan Anthony consecrated (OrthodoxWiki, “John (Maximovitch) the Wonderworker,” used as a locator; OCA, “Saint John Maximovitch, Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco,” oca.org). Metropolitan Anthony’s esteem is preserved in a letter to Archbishop Dimitry in the Far East: “I am very old and unable to travel … But in place of myself, as my soul, as my heart, I am sending you Bishop John. This little, frail man, looking almost like a child, is in actuality a miracle of ascetic firmness and strictness in our time of total spiritual enfeeblement” (Metropolitan Anthony [Khrapovitsky], letter, quoted in OCA, oca.org). That this formation came from the very hierarch who would preside over ROCOR’s 1935 conciliar condemnation of Sophiology situates St. John’s theology within the church’s dogmatic mainstream (see The Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God).

Loyalty Without the Harder Polemics

St. John never left ROCOR’s canonical path, but his temperament differed from its sharper polemical wing. The documented instances of his breadth are several and consistent.

Service with other Orthodox peoples. In Shanghai — his see as a ROCOR bishop from 1934 — he worked “to restore unity among the various Orthodox nationalities” and served, at the request of local Greeks and Macedonians, in the Greek language, a hierarch of the Russian Church abroad ministering across ethnic lines (OrthodoxWiki, locator for the primary accounts). The same breadth marked his charity: the orphanage he founded in Shanghai gathered children of every background, not only Russian, and his pastoral concern extended to the whole displaced Orthodox population of the city rather than to his own nation alone (see St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco). His regard for the Serbian Church, in whose lands he was formed and ordained, remained lifelong.

The Western saints and the Western missions. Assigned to the Archdiocese of Western Europe from 1951, with his see first at Paris and then at Brussels, St. John undertook the recovery of the Orthodox saints of the pre-Schism West. He collected their lives and images and submitted a long list of them to the ROCOR Synod with a view to their veneration — an effort by which, in the words of his biographers, “a great many pre-Schism Western saints became known in the Orthodox Church and continue to be venerated to this day,” among them St. Genevieve of Paris and St. Patrick of Ireland (Wikipedia, “John of Shanghai and San Francisco,” and OrthodoxWiki, used as locators for the synodal submission; relicsofthesaints.org). The interest was deliberate and theological: it expressed his conviction that Orthodoxy was the native faith of the West before the Schism, not a Russian import to it. He took the Orthodox Church of France under his archpastoral care, serving as archpastor of the French Orthodox mission and ordaining the man who would become its second bishop, and he likewise supported the Dutch Orthodox mission (OrthodoxWiki, “John (Maximovitch) the Wonderworker,” locator; westernrite.miraheze.org, “John Maximovitch”). On the missionary theology behind this, see Sermons and Reports.

Recognition of grace beyond his jurisdiction. These activities reflect a hierarch who did not treat ROCOR as the sole locus of the Church’s grace but worked within and alongside other Orthodox bodies. His ecclesiology was expressly one of communion: at the very Second All-Diaspora Council of 1938 he insisted that the Russian Church Abroad “must not interrupt communion with other Churches,” a principle later cited to argue that St. John was no schismatic but a hierarch who held the canonical and the catholic together (orthochristian.com, “Was St. John (Maximovitch) a Schismatic?,” no. 127695; silouanthompson.net, “Saint John was not a schismatic”). This is the aspect of his witness that the broader Orthodox world has most readily embraced, and it stands in some contrast to the more exclusivist ecclesiology articulated in ROCOR’s later anti-ecumenist documents under his successor (see St. Philaret of New York).

The 1964 First-Hierarch Election

St. John’s role in the choice of ROCOR’s third First Hierarch is a fixed point of the church’s history and is recorded in this repository’s account of Metropolitan Philaret. When the aged Metropolitan Anastassy (Gribanovsky) moved to retire in 1964, the Synod was deadlocked between two parties: supporters of Archbishop John of San Francisco, who favored an outward-facing, missionary ROCOR open to converts, and supporters of Archbishop Nikon (Rklitsky), who saw the church’s first task as the preservation of Russian tradition. With the votes nearly even and neither side conceding, the resolution was to elect a “neutral” junior bishop belonging to no party — and the candidate, the youngest hierarch by consecration, Bishop Philaret of Brisbane, was put forward by Archbishop John himself (see St. Philaret of New York; orthodoxcanada.ca). Philaret was elected on May 27, 1964, and at his enthronement Archbishop John, as the senior hierarch present, handed him the episcopal staff. That St. John both nominated and installed the compromise candidate — declining the primacy that one ROCOR party wished for him — is characteristic of the man.

The Internal Opposition and the San Francisco Trial

St. John’s last years were marked by an opposition that had a church-political as well as a personal dimension. Transferred to San Francisco in 1962 at the urgent request of thousands who had known him in Shanghai, he found a community divided by a bitter dispute and a cathedral — the Holy Virgin “Joy of All Who Sorrow” on Geary Boulevard — left unfinished amid the conflict (Wikipedia and OrthodoxWiki, “John Maximovitch,” used as locators; relicsofthesaints.org). He was slandered by opponents within the parish, who brought a civil lawsuit alleging mishandling of the cathedral’s finances. The court found in his favor: “Vladyka John resolved the conflict, was acquitted by the court … and all involved were completely exonerated,” and the cathedral was completed in 1963 (OrthodoxWiki / parish accounts as cited above). The episode was, in the standard accounts, less a financial matter than the surfacing of a factional resistance to a hierarch whose holiness and independence unsettled certain interests; he bore it, the sources record, “without complaint, without judging anyone, with undisturbed peacefulness” (OrthodoxWiki, locator). The trial belongs to the church-political texture of his ROCOR career, not merely to his personal sufferings: the same divisions that pitted a missionary, convert-friendly party against a preservationist one — the very split that the 1964 election had had to navigate — ran through the San Francisco community, and St. John, identified with the outward-facing wing, drew the resentment of those who saw in his independence a threat. That his vindication came through a secular court rather than a church tribunal only sharpened the bitterness of his final years, even as it left his name cleared.

How He Is Claimed Today

St. John of Shanghai is venerated across a spectrum that his own breadth made possible. ROCOR traditionalists honor him as a model of the church’s ideal — uncompromising Orthodoxy in the conditions of exile, asceticism and miracle-working preserved whole into the twentieth century — and his glorification by ROCOR on July 2, 1994 was a defining act of the church’s life (see St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco). At the same time the broader Orthodox world claims him: on July 2, 2008, following the 2007 reconciliation between ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate, the Moscow Patriarchate recognized his glorification for universal veneration, and he is honored well beyond ROCOR’s bounds, in part because his missionary universality and service across jurisdictions resonate with Orthodox of many backgrounds (Wikipedia, “John of Shanghai and San Francisco,” locator for the 2008 act of recognition). Both readings are attributions made by their respective communities; the historical figure sustains both because he combined unwavering canonical loyalty with a catholic vision that refused to make that loyalty narrow — a both/and that later commentators have invoked precisely against attempts to enlist him for a separatist reading of ROCOR’s identity.

References

Eastern American Diocese of ROCOR and Orthodox Church in America. “Saint John Maximovitch, Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco.” oca.org/saints (used for the consecration date and Metropolitan Anthony’s letter).
Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint John (Maximovitch)” and “Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky).” orthodoxcanada.ca (for the 1964 election and deadlock).
“John (Maximovitch) the Wonderworker.” OrthodoxWiki — used to locate the primary accounts of his Shanghai, French, and Dutch service (per METHODOLOGY §2.3).
“John Maximovitch.” Western Orthodox Wiki, westernrite.miraheze.org; and “John of Shanghai and San Francisco,” Wikipedia — locators for the Western missions and the San Francisco trial.
relicsofthesaints.org, “St John of Shanghai, San Francisco and W. Europe — Wonderworker” (San Francisco division and trial; Western saints).
OrthoChristian.com, “Was St. John (Maximovitch) a Schismatic?,” no. 127695; and silouanthompson.net, “Saint John was not a schismatic” (the 1938 statement on communion with other Churches).
Opredelenie of the ROCOR Council of Bishops on the teaching of Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov, October 17/30, 1935 (Metropolitan Anthony presiding).
Rose, Fr. Seraphim, and Damascene Christensen. Blessed John the Wonderworker. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1987.