Glorification 2000

The death of the elder Seraphim of Vyritsa in 1949 and his canonization half a century later, in August 2000, by the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church — the same council that glorified the great host of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. This file sets his glorification in that historic context and explains its meaning: the formal recognition, by the Church he had served through its destruction, of the holiness of one of its hidden elders.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (20th-c. elder; Soviet period)

The Death of the Elder

The elder Seraphim died at Vyritsa on 3 April 1949 (the date given in the hagiographical tradition; commemorated on that day), having outlived his former wife the schemanun Seraphima (d. 1945) by four years and survived into the uneasy postwar settlement of the Soviet church (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim; Moscow Patriarchate hagiographical notice). He was buried at Vyritsa, near the church where he had worshipped, and his grave at once became a place of local veneration — the beginning of the cult that would, half a century later, issue in his glorification (see Vyritsa as a Place of Pilgrimage). The biographies relate that veneration at his grave continued quietly through the remaining Soviet decades, sustained by the disciples and the local faithful even under a regime still hostile to such devotion.

The Jubilee Council of 2000

In August 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church convened, in the newly rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, the Jubilee Bishops’ Council marking the two-thousandth anniversary of the Nativity of Christ. The council is best remembered for its great act of glorification: the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia of the twentieth century — a vast number of the bishops, priests, monastics, and laypeople who had suffered and died in the Soviet persecution, named and unnamed, headed by the royal passion-bearers (Tsar Nicholas II and his family) and by such figures as Patriarch Tikhon and Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd (acts of the Jubilee Council, 2000; on the New Martyrs, Orthodoxy: New Martyrs and Confessors; on Tikhon, St. Tikhon of Moscow).

It was at this same Jubilee Council that Seraphim of Vyritsa was glorified — canonized as a venerable elder (prepodobny) of the Russian Church, his name entered in the calendar of the saints (acts of the Jubilee Council, August 2000; Moscow Patriarchate notice). His glorification belongs, then, to the great post-Soviet recovery of the saints of the persecution: the Church, freed at last, recognizing the holiness that had been hidden through its long martyrdom. The elder of Vyritsa — not himself a martyr, but a confessor in the broad sense, who had kept the faith and ministered through the whole Soviet ordeal — was numbered among those whom that ordeal had sanctified.

The Meaning of the Glorification

The glorification carried a particular significance for a figure of his kind. The New Martyrs proper were those put to death for the faith; Seraphim of Vyritsa died in his bed in 1949. His canonization recognized a different but related sanctity — the sanctity of the confessor and the elder who endured the persecution to its end, kept the canonical Church against the Renovationist schism, sustained the faithful through the Terror and the war, and transmitted the ascetic tradition through the years of its near-extinction (see Spiritual Father in the Time of Terror, The Years of the Great Terror). His glorification affirms that the Church’s holiness in the Soviet century was carried not only by those who died for it but by those who quietly kept it alive — the hidden elders in their wooden houses.

A service and an akathist were composed for his veneration, and his commemoration was fixed (3 April, with a further commemoration associated with the uncovering of his relics). These liturgical texts, like the hagiographical notice, draw their narrative substance from the devotional tradition gathered by Filimonov, and so ratify rather than independently verify the biographical tradition (see The Biographies).

A Glorification, Not a Verification

It is worth stating, in keeping with the methodology, what a glorification is and is not. The Church’s canonization is an act of recognition of holiness and a summons to veneration; it is not a historical-critical certification of every incident in a saint’s Life. The glorification of Seraphim of Vyritsa establishes that the Church venerates him as a saint; it does not, and is not meant to, adjudicate the source-critical questions about the stone-prayer, the prophecies, or the authorship of “From Me This Has Come” treated in the preceding sections. The faithful venerate the saint; the historian still weighs the sources — and the two are not in conflict, for the Church’s recognition rests on the holiness of the man, not on the documentary security of every story told about him (see The Problem of Embellishment).

See Also

References

  • Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). Acts of the Jubilee Bishops’ Council, Moscow, August 2000 (glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, and of St. Seraphim of Vyritsa); hagiographical notice, service, and akathist.
  • Filimonov, Valentin P. Вырицкий старец преподобный Серафим [Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim]. St. Petersburg, 1990s–2000s. (Death in 1949; the local veneration; basis of the glorification materials.)
  • Davis, Nathaniel. A Long Walk to Church. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003. (The post-Soviet recovery of the Church and the glorification of the New Martyrs.)