The Arguments For and Against

The canonization of the imperial family was debated for decades within the Orthodox Church, not merely between the Church and its critics. This file sets out the case made by proponents and the case made by opponents, each in its strongest and most sympathetic form and in its own terms, per METHODOLOGY §4. It names positions and does not adjudicate; its purpose is to let the reader see why serious, faithful Orthodox Christians disagreed — and why the Church ultimately chose the carefully limited category of passion-bearer.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / ROCOR

Why Both Sides Were Serious

It is a mistake — and one this collection refuses — to imagine that only the impious opposed the canonization or only the pious supported it. The debate ran through the Moscow Patriarchate’s own episcopate and theological establishment in the 1990s, and it was conducted by people who agreed on the faith and disagreed on this application of it (Slater, The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II, 2007, on the range of Russian opinion). Presenting both cases fairly is not neutrality between truth and error; it is fidelity to the fact that the Church itself weighed real objections before glorifying, and framed the glorification precisely to answer them.

The Case For Canonization

Proponents — including the eventual majority of the Synodal Commission for the Canonization of Saints under Metropolitan Yuvenaly, and, earlier and more emphatically, ROCOR — argued along several lines.

1. The manner of the death and the conduct of captivity. The core of the case is not the reign but the sixteen months of confinement and the killing that ended them. The family’s own captivity letters and diaries attest meekness, patience, sustained prayer, the reading of Scripture, and — most strikingly — the absence of expressed hatred toward their captors, with passages counseling forgiveness (see The Inner Spiritual Life). A verse copied out by the Grand Duchess Olga in captivity, praying that God would give strength to forgive the people’s cruelty and to bear a “shameful and humiliating” end, became a touchstone of the case (the “prayer” is drawn from a poem by S. Bekhteeva copied by Olga; discussed in Slater, 2007). Proponents read this as a Christ-like acceptance of unjust death — the substance of the passion-bearer’s witness.

2. The precedent of the passion-bearers. The Russian Church already possessed the category of страстотерпец, established with its first native saints, Saints Boris and Gleb, who were killed not for confessing the faith but for accepting death without resistance in imitation of Christ (see Saints Boris and Gleb and The Theology of the Passion-Bearer). The family’s death, proponents argued, fit this native Russian category exactly, whatever one made of the classical title “martyr.”

3. The living cult. By 2000, veneration of the family was a widespread fact of Russian and diaspora piety, with reported miracles and an existing ROCOR glorification behind it. In Orthodox practice the Church characteristically ratifies a cult that has already arisen among the faithful rather than manufacturing one; the vigor of the veneration was itself part of the case (Slater, The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II, 2007).

4. The witness against the Soviet catastrophe. Situated within the host of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, the family’s glorification stood as the emblematic instance of the whole twentieth-century martyrdom of the Russian Church under an atheist regime — a witness the Church judged it owed to the countless unknown victims as much as to the Romanovs themselves.

The Case Against Canonization

Opponents within the Church — including a number of bishops, clergy, and theologians in the 1990s Moscow debate — pressed objections that the Commission took seriously enough to shape the final act around them.

1. The political record. The gravest objection was that Nicholas’s conduct as ruler told against sanctity, or at least against public honor as a saint: the Khodynka catastrophe, “Bloody Sunday” of 1905 and the epithet “Nicholas the Bloody,” the tolerance of antisemitic violence, and the ruinous conduct of the war and the 1915 assumption of command (see Nicholas II as Ruler). To canonize such a ruler, opponents feared, would seem to sanctify the failures — and the autocracy — themselves (Slater, The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II, 2007).

2. The danger of a political cult. A closely related fear, and one that has proved well founded, was that the canonization would be captured by a reactionary, nationalist, and monarchist politics — and worse, that it would feed the emerging “Tsar-Redeemer” (tsarebozhie) current that ascribes to Nicholas a redemptive, quasi-messianic role (see The Tsar-Redeemer Heresy). Opponents warned that the veneration was already tending toward this excess and that a canonization would accelerate it.

3. The category problem. Some argued that the family were not martyrs in the strict sense at all, because they were killed as the deposed royal family in a civil-war political execution, not for an explicit confession of Christ that they could have escaped by apostasy. On this view the classical martyr’s title, which ROCOR had used, was theologically imprecise.

4. Prudential and pastoral concerns. Others worried about the timing and the divisiveness — that a contested canonization in the fraught post-Soviet 1990s would sow discord and be read as the Church taking sides in Russia’s political struggles over its imperial past.

How the Church’s Act Answered the Objections

The 2000 glorification can be read as a deliberate attempt to grant what was true in the objections while still honoring what was true in the case for canonization. The Commission (a) grounded the glorification in the captivity and death rather than the reign; (b) chose the narrower category of passion-bearer rather than martyr, meeting the “category problem”; (c) stated explicitly that the reign was “contradictory” and open to criticism and that the monarchist idea was not being canonized, meeting the “political record” objection; and (d) later, and repeatedly, condemned the tsarebozhie current, meeting the “political cult” objection at least in principle (report of Metropolitan Yuvenaly, 2000; see What the Church Canonized and The Tsar-Redeemer Heresy). Whether these measures have succeeded in practice — especially against tsarebozhie, which persists — is a further and open question (see Veneration versus Cult-Excess).

What This File Does Not Do

This file does not tell the reader which side was right. The glorification is an act of the Church, received by the faithful; the historical and prudential objections were real and, in the case of the political cult, partly vindicated by events. The honest position, and the one this collection holds, is that a family’s Christian death can be genuinely honored and the canonization’s political misuse genuinely resisted — that these are not in tension but are, in fact, the two halves of the Church’s own carefully limited act. The reader is left with both cases and with the Church’s chosen resolution, and is pointed to the theology of the passion-bearer for what that resolution actually means.

See Also

References

  • Slater, Wendy. The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II: Relics, Remains and the Romanovs. London: Routledge, 2007. (The range of Russian opinion in the 1990s debate; the objections and the case for; the political entanglements; the Bekhteeva/Olga “prayer.”)
  • Report of Metropolitan Yuvenaly of Krutitsy and Kolomna to the Jubilee Bishops’ Council, Moscow, August 2000. (The grounds and limits of the glorification; the answers to the objections.)
  • Saints Boris and Gleb — see Saints Boris and Gleb, the passion-bearer precedent invoked by proponents.