1981 and 1989: The Two Glorifications

St. Tikhon was glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia on October 19 / November 1, 1981, among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, and by the Moscow Patriarchate on September 26 / October 9, 1989, at the Bishops’ Council convened for the four-hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Russian patriarchate. The two acts, separated by eight years and a still-standing Soviet state, are read together here: their dates, the documents that record them, and what Moscow’s 1989 glorification signaled at the dawn of the glasnost era.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified 1989)

The ROCOR Glorification (October 19 / November 1, 1981)

St. Tikhon was first glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. At its Council of Bishops in New York under Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky), ROCOR solemnly glorified the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia on October 19 / November 1, 1981, and Patriarch Tikhon was named by name within that act (ROCOR Council of Bishops, Act of Glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, New York, 1981; Eastern American Diocese, “The Canonization of the New Martyrs … in 1981 — How It Happened”). This is the date and framing recorded in the repository’s New Martyrs file: ROCOR “had already included him by name in its glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors on October 19 / November 1, 1981.”

For the émigré Church the choice was natural and necessary. ROCOR understood itself as the free voice of a Church silenced inside Russia, and Tikhon — the canonical patriarch under whom the persecution began, who had anathematized the persecutors and never rescinded it — was the keystone figure of the confessor-host it could honor when Moscow could not. He was glorified specifically as a confessor: one who suffered for the faith without being put to death for it — a category the Church has used since antiquity for those who endured persecution short of martyrdom, and the one that most exactly fits a patriarch who died, worn down by arrest and pressure, in his own bed under guard.

The 1981 glorification had a polemical edge that its context makes plain. ROCOR’s whole ecclesial self-understanding rested on the conviction that the Moscow Patriarchate after Metropolitan Sergius’s 1927 Declaration had purchased its institutional survival by submission to an atheist state (the Sergianist controversy treated in the repo’s New Martyrs file and at ROCOR: 2007 Reunion). To glorify Patriarch Tikhon — the pre-Sergian patriarch whose canonical legitimacy ROCOR had always acknowledged, and whose 1918 anathema and famine-resistance ROCOR read as the authentic line the persecuted Church should have held — was, among other things, to enthrone the standard against which the émigré Church measured the Soviet-era patriarchate. Tikhon’s confessorship was, for ROCOR in 1981, both an act of veneration and an argument.

The Moscow Glorification (September 26 / October 9, 1989)

The Moscow Patriarchate glorified St. Tikhon eight years later, at the Bishops’ Council (Arkhiereisky Sobor) of October 1989, on September 26 / October 9 (OCA, “Glorification of Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia”; Wikipedia, “Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow,” giving 9 October / 26 September O.S. 1989). The repository’s anchor fixes the occasion precisely: the council was “held in connection with the 400th anniversary of the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate” — that is, the patriarchate founded in 1589 under Patriarch Job — and not at the 1988 millennium of the Baptism of Rus’, when a different group of nine saints had been canonized (New Martyrs file; Post-Soviet Revival, which lists the nine millennium-canonizations of June 1988 — Dimitry Donskoy, Andrei Rublev, and the rest — none of them Tikhon).

The distinction is more than calendrical. The 1988 millennium council canonized saints of the deep Russian past, safely remote from Soviet history; to canonize Tikhon was something else. He was the first figure of the New-Martyr era that the Moscow Patriarchate was able to glorify — the patriarch under whom the persecution had begun, whose very canonization implied a judgment on the regime that had hounded him. That Moscow could do this in October 1989, while the Soviet Union still existed, is routinely read as a marker of the glasnost-era thaw in church–state relations: the 1989 glorification “is generally considered an example of the thaw in Church–Soviet relations during the glasnost era” (OCA, “Glorification of Saint Tikhon”). The reading is an attributed assessment, not a claim the council itself made; but it is the standard one, and it explains why Tikhon’s was the canonization that opened the road to the great glorification of the New Martyrs at the Jubilee Council of 2000 (Post-Soviet Revival).

The timing repays a moment’s attention. In June 1988 the millennium council had canonized nine saints of the safely distant Russian past — figures whose veneration implied no judgment on the Soviet present. By October 1989 the political ground had shifted far enough that the patriarchate could reach into the wound of its own century and glorify the patriarch whom the regime had imprisoned and hounded to death. The act was thus a barometer of how much the Church inside Russia could now say aloud; and it was a deliberate first step. Having canonized Tikhon, the patriarchate could and did proceed over the following decade to glorify the wider host of New Martyrs — Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev and the Petrograd martyrs in 1992, Archbishop Hilarion in 1999, and the more than a thousand named saints of the Jubilee Council of 2000 (New Martyrs file). Tikhon’s glorification was the breach in the wall through which the rest came.

The Act’s Language: Confessor

Both jurisdictions glorified St. Tikhon under the same title — confessor (ispovednik) — and the agreement is significant. ROCOR’s 1981 act ranks him among the “New Martyrs and Confessors,” and the repo’s New Martyrs file notes that “he is commemorated as a Confessor (one who suffered for the faith without being killed for it), though some consider his death to have been indirectly caused by the persecution.” Moscow’s 1989 act likewise numbered him among the saints as a confessor of the faith (OCA, “Glorification of Saint Tikhon”). The choice of confessor over martyr is exact: it honors the imprisonment, the pressure, and the long ordeal of his patriarchate without resolving the still-open question of his death — the official record gives heart failure, while rumors of poisoning circulated from the first and have never been documented (New Martyrs file; the disputed-cause note there). The confessor-title is also what makes his glorification a judgment on his witness rather than on the contested loyalty declarations of his final years (see The Testament Question).

That distinction is worth dwelling on, because it is what allowed two churches at odds over the meaning of Tikhon’s last acts to glorify him in identical terms. A glorification as martyr in the strict sense would have required a finding about the cause and character of his death that the evidence cannot bear; a glorification that rested on the loyalty declarations would have forced each church to a verdict on the duress documents that divided them. The confessor category sidesteps both. It fixes the saint’s holiness in what is beyond dispute — that he bore arrest, slander, the loss of his Church’s freedom, and unrelenting pressure without apostasy — and leaves the disputed texts and the disputed death where the historians must continue to weigh them. The canonizations of 1981 and 1989 thus canonize the witness, not the documents, and it is the witness on which all the heirs of the Russian Church agree.

The Feast Days

St. Tikhon is commemorated on several dates, and they should be kept distinct:

Repose: March 25 / April 7, 1925. He died on the Old-Style feast of the Annunciation (March 25), which falls on April 7 New Style; this is his principal feast-day. [Disputed/clarification: because the repose coincides with the Annunciation, his repose-commemoration is sometimes transferred or noted under both reckonings — the date is fixed (March 25 O.S. / April 7 N.S.), but its liturgical observance accommodates the great feast.]
Glorification: September 26 / October 9 — the anniversary of the 1989 Moscow glorification, which also coincides with the repose of St. John the Theologian (Old Style).
Election as Patriarch: November 5 / 18, 1917 — commemorating his election to the restored patriarchal throne by the drawing of lots at the Local Council on November 5 / 18, 1917 (OCA, “Repose of Saint Tikhon”; OrthodoxWiki, “Tikhon of Moscow”).
Finding of the Relics: February 9 / 22 — added after the recovery of his incorrupt relics at the Donskoy Monastery in February 1992 (treated in Shared Veneration).

He is additionally commemorated within the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, kept on the Sunday nearest January 25 / February 7.

A word on the calendar tangle is in order, since it recurs in the literature. The Russian Church reckons fixed feasts by the Julian (“Old Style”) calendar, which in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries runs thirteen days behind the civil (“New Style”) calendar; hence the doubled dates throughout (March 25 / April 7 for the repose, September 26 / October 9 for the glorification, and so on). The repose-day is the one most often misstated, because it falls on the Annunciation: a writer who sees “March 25” may take it for a New-Style date and arrive at the wrong April reckoning, or may transfer the commemoration on account of the great feast. The fixed datum is unambiguous — Tikhon reposed on the Old-Style Annunciation, March 25 / April 7, 1925 — and the apparent discrepancy between “March 25” and “April 7” is simply the two calendars naming the one day. The dates listed above should be read with that double reckoning in mind.

References

ROCOR Council of Bishops. Act of Glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. New York, October 19 / November 1, 1981. (Account: Eastern American Diocese of ROCOR, “The Canonization of the New Martyrs by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia in 1981 — How It Happened,” eadiocese.org.)
Moscow Patriarchate, Bishops’ Council. Glorification of St. Tikhon, September 26 / October 9, 1989 (held in connection with the 400th anniversary of the establishment of the Russian patriarchate).
Orthodox Church in America. “Glorification of Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Enlightener of North America”; “Repose of Saint Tikhon.” oca.org.
“Tikhon of Moscow.” OrthodoxWiki (used to locate the feast-day and election dates; cross-checked against OCA).
“Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow.” Wikipedia (canonization dates: ROCOR 1 Nov. / 19 Oct. O.S. 1981; Moscow 9 Oct. / 26 Sept. O.S. 1989 — used to locate; cross-checked against OCA and the repo’s New Martyrs file).
Vostryshev, Mikhail. Patriarkh Tikhon. 2nd ed. Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya (ZhZL), 2004.