Glorification 2004

On 16 January 2004 the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople resolved to number Mother Maria Skobtsova and her three companions among the saints; the solemn glorification was celebrated in Paris later that year. This file presents the act, the feast, and — with the honesty the case requires — the present, incomplete state of her reception across the Orthodox world.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré; glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, 2004)

The Act of Glorification

Mother Maria was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, under whose jurisdiction the Russian émigré exarchate in Western Europe stood. The Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate took the decision on 16 January 2004, numbering among the saints four figures of the rue de Lourmel: Mother Maria (Skobtsova); her son Yuri (George) Skobtsov; the priest Dimitri Klépinin; and the layman Ilya Fondaminsky (Ecumenical Patriarchate, Synodal decision of 16 January 2004; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, and later accounts; see The Four Glorified Together). The solemn service of glorification was celebrated in Paris, at the Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky on the rue Daru — the historic center of the Russian emigration — in the spring of that year (accounts of the 2004 glorification). [Disputed: the reports give the Synodal decision as 16 January 2004 and the celebratory glorification service in Paris in the following months (commonly May 2004); the precise liturgical date of the celebration is reported with minor variation across the accounts, while the year (2004) and the acting authority (the Ecumenical Patriarchate) are firmly established.]

That the glorifying authority was Constantinople, and specifically the jurisdiction to which the Paris exarchate belonged, is not an incidental detail. It reflects the concrete ecclesial history — Mother Maria was tonsured and lived her whole monastic life under Metropolitan Evlogy’s Constantinopolitan exarchate (see The Nun Who Would Not Stay in the Cloister) — and it bears directly on the contested character of her reception (see below and The Contested Saint — Methodology).

The Feast

Mother Maria and her companions are commemorated with a feast; the date most commonly given for their joint commemoration is 20 July (accounts of the 2004 glorification and Orthodox calendars deriving from it). [Disputed: the feast day assigned at glorification is generally given as 20 July, but the commemoration is also encountered on or near the date of Mother Maria’s death (31 March) in some accounts and calendars; the sources are not fully uniform, and this collection reports 20 July as the date most commonly cited while noting the variation.] The commemoration is of the four together, as the glorification was of the four together — a feast of the martyrs of the rue de Lourmel.

Iconography of Mother Maria has developed since the glorification: she is depicted in the monastic habit, sometimes with the barbed wire of the camp, sometimes with a needle and thread in reference to her embroidery, and sometimes among her companions — the visual tradition still forming, as is natural for a saint so recently glorified (Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003; later iconographic practice).

The State of the Reception

Honesty requires a clear statement of how far her veneration extends, because the answer is part of the truth about her. Mother Maria was glorified by one autocephalous Church — the Ecumenical Patriarchate — and, as of this writing, she is not on the calendars of the Moscow Patriarchate, of the Russian Church Abroad (ROCOR), or of a number of other local Orthodox Churches (see The Contested Saint — Methodology). [Disputed: there is no formal act of any Orthodox Church condemning her veneration; her absence from other calendars reflects non-reception rather than repudiation, and reception across the Orthodox world is an organic and unfinished process. The situation as reported here is the present state of a reception still in motion, not a settled pan-Orthodox status either for or against.]

This partial reception is exactly what one would expect of a contested saint. The Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Church of her own jurisdiction and of the more world-engaged wing of the tradition, received her; the Churches and currents in which the reservations about her biography, her anti-ritualism, and her Bulgakovian formation weigh most heavily have not (yet) done so (see The Contested Saint — Methodology; on the theology of what such a reception claims, What the Church Received). The glorification is thus real and canonical, and her sanctity is truly proclaimed; but the reception of that proclamation across Orthodoxy is incomplete, and the collection reports it as incomplete rather than smoothing it into a universality it does not have.

The Wider Recognition

Alongside the ecclesial glorification stands the older, external recognition already noted: Yad Vashem’s honoring of Mother Maria and Fr. Dimitri Klépinin as Righteous Among the Nations, on the testimony of the Jews they saved (see Sheltering Jews Under the Nazis). The two recognitions — the Church’s glorification and Yad Vashem’s honor — come from very different quarters and rest on the same deeds, and together they account for the breadth of her memory beyond the bounds of any single calendar (see Legacy and Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Hackel, Sergei. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891–1945. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1965; rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981. (The life and death that grounded the glorification; later editions and accounts note the veneration.)
  • Skobtsova, Mother Maria. Essential Writings. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; introduction by Jim Forest. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. (Forest’s introduction for the glorification and its context.)
  • Ecumenical Patriarchate, Synodal decision of 16 January 2004, and the accounts of the glorification service in Paris later that year. (The act glorifying the four; the feast; the acting authority.)
  • Yad Vashem, The Righteous Among the Nations Database (records for Maria Skobtsova and Dimitri Klépinin).