The Glorifications
The both-sides flagship of the collection: how the Russian Church came to glorify the New Martyrs, in two distinct acts on two distinct principles — the Russian Church Abroad’s glorification of 1981 and the Moscow Patriarchate’s Jubilee Council of 2000 — and how the Sergianism question, the criteria of martyrdom, and the difficulty of the archives left a body of genuinely contested and withdrawn cases. This section names the positions and does not adjudicate.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox
Overview
The glorification of the New Martyrs was not a single event but two, separated by nineteen years, a jurisdictional rupture, and a real difference of principle — and it is the point at which every tension in the whole history comes to a head. This section is the collection’s source-critical centre.
The first file, Methodology, is the flagship. It sets the ROCOR glorification of 1981 beside the Moscow Patriarchate’s Jubilee Council of 2000 — what each did, what each claimed, whom each included, and why they differed — and treats the Sergianism question that stands behind the difference: whether, and how far, submission to the atheist state disqualifies a candidate, and why some cases are contested for exactly this reason. It names the criteria and the disputed cases and does not adjudicate them.
The second file, The Criteria and the Contested Cases, goes closer into the working of the Moscow Patriarchate’s canonization commission: how it judged cases, the central criterion of non-betrayal, the cases withdrawn or never advanced, and the difficulty of the archives that has slowed the process to a near-halt.
Contents
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| methodology.md | The both-sides flagship: ROCOR 1981 vs Moscow Patriarchate 2000; the Sergianism question; the criteria; the contested cases; no adjudication |
| the-criteria-and-the-contested-cases.md | How the commission worked; the non-betrayal criterion; cases withdrawn; the difficulty of the archives |
See Also
- What a New Martyr Is — the categories the glorifications applied
- The Solovki Camp — the 1926–27 episcopal witness behind the Sergianism question
- Memory and Controversy — the still-contested memory
- ROCOR — the Russian Church Abroad and its 1981 glorification
- The Russian Orthodox Tradition — the Moscow Patriarchate context
References
- Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018.
- Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.