The Two Glorifications: A Both-Sides Account

The source-critical flagship of the collection. The New Martyrs were glorified twice, on two principles: the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia proclaimed them in 1981, and the Moscow Patriarchate glorified them at the Jubilee Council of 2000. This file sets the two acts side by side — what each did and claimed, whom each included — and treats the question that stands behind their difference: Sergianism, the submission of the Church’s leadership to the atheist state, and why it makes some cases genuinely contested. It names the positions of both sides and, per the repository methodology, does not adjudicate between them.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified ROCOR 1981; Moscow Patriarchate 2000)

Why There Are Two Glorifications

The New Martyrs were glorified twice because the Russian Church itself was divided in two for most of the twentieth century, and the division ran precisely along the fault line that the martyrs’ own story exposed. After the revolution, a part of the Russian episcopate and faithful went into exile and organized themselves as the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR, the “Church Abroad”), governed from abroad and holding that the Church inside the USSR was captive to and compromised by the atheist state. The Church that remained in Russia — the Moscow Patriarchate — survived under that state, and after Metropolitan Sergius’s Declaration of loyalty in 1927 it did so on terms that ROCOR and others regarded as a spiritual surrender (see The Solovki Camp and St. Tikhon and the Patriarchal Church). For most of the century the two bodies were not in communion. The New Martyrs were therefore glorified first by the Church that was free to name the persecutors — ROCOR, in 1981 — and only later, after the Soviet Union fell, by the Church that had lived under them — the Moscow Patriarchate, in 2000. The two glorifications are two answers, from the two halves of a divided Church, to the same martyrdom; and the reconciliation of the two bodies in 2007 was itself sealed in the name of the shared martyrs (see Memory and Controversy).

The ROCOR Glorification of 1981

The Russian Church Abroad glorified the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at a Council of Bishops in New York in 1981, with the solemn glorification service celebrated on Sunday, 1 November 1981 (19 October / 1 November, old and new style) at the Synodal Cathedral of the Mother of God “of the Sign” in Manhattan (ROCOR Synod of Bishops, glorification of the New Martyrs, 1981; the date and setting are documented in the ROCOR sources, e.g. rocorstudies.org, “The Order of Glorifying Saints in ROCOR (1920–2007),” and eadiocese.org, “The Canonization of the New Martyrs by the Council of Bishops of ROCOR in 1981”). What ROCOR did, and claimed, had a particular shape:

Scope. ROCOR glorified the New Martyrs as a body — all those, named and unnamed, who suffered and died for Christ in the Russian persecution, “from the Russian Revolution, the Civil War and the Communist persecution,” across every rank from patriarch to layman (ROCOR glorification, 1981). It was a collective canonization of the whole martyred Church, not primarily a list of individually vetted cases.
The Royal Family as martyrs. ROCOR expressly included the imperial family in the glorification, and venerated them as martyrs — a point that was, for ROCOR and its constituency, central and deliberate (see The Imperial Passion-Bearers).
A confessional stance. The 1981 act was, unavoidably, also a statement about the Church inside Russia. In glorifying the martyrs of the atheist persecution, ROCOR implicitly contrasted them with the Moscow Patriarchate that had made its peace with the persecutors; the glorification was, for ROCOR, of a piece with its rejection of “Sergianism” (Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, Routledge, 2018, on the ROCOR glorification and its polemical edge against the Moscow Patriarchate).

The Moscow Patriarchate’s Jubilee Council of 2000

The Moscow Patriarchate glorified the New Martyrs at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council held in Moscow, 13–16 August 2000, convened for the two-thousandth anniversary of the Nativity of Christ (Moscow Patriarchate, Jubilee Bishops’ Council, 13–16 August 2000; the acts of the Council). This was a very different kind of act:

Named and unnamed together. The Council glorified a Sobor (Synaxis) of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia comprising more than a thousand named individuals whose cases had been examined and established, together with a general glorification of the whole multitude of the New Martyrs “known and unknown,” revealed and unrevealed, “whose names are known to God” (Jubilee Council, 2000; the number “more than a thousand” named and the general glorification of the unknown; see The Scale of the Persecution). The Synodal Canonization Commission, chaired by Metropolitan Yuvenaly (Poyarkov) of Krutitsy, had assembled the individual cases from the archives over the preceding decade.
A continuing list. Unlike the collective ROCOR act, the Moscow glorification was designed to grow: the named Sobor was to be extended case by case as the Commission completed its investigations, so that by 1 January 2011 the number of individually canonized New Martyrs and Confessors had reached 1,774 (the running total; see The Criteria and the Contested Cases).
The Royal Family as passion-bearers. The Council glorified the imperial family — but, after long internal debate, as passion-bearers (strastoterptsy), not as martyrs, a narrower category honouring the manner of their death without asserting a death “for the faith” (Jubilee Council, 2000; on the debate and the choice of category, Christensen, 2018, ch. 5; see The Imperial Passion-Bearers).

The Sergianism Question

Behind the difference between the two glorifications stands the single most contested question in the whole history of the New Martyrs: Sergianism. The word names the policy inaugurated by Metropolitan Sergius’s Declaration of 1927 — the Church’s public profession of loyalty to, and even identification with, the Soviet state that was persecuting it (see The Solovki Camp). It bears on the glorification of the martyrs at two levels, and both must be stated from both sides.

At the level of the two Churches. [Disputed: whether the Moscow Patriarchate, as the heir of Sergius’s 1927 Declaration, could rightly glorify the New Martyrs at all. (a) The ROCOR / critical view held, especially before the 2000 glorification, that a Church which had bought its survival by submission to the persecutors was compromised in venerating the martyrs of that very persecution — that some of the New Martyrs had died precisely resisting the Sergianist accommodation, and that for the Sergianist Church to canonize them was contradictory; ROCOR’s own 1981 glorification implicitly made this charge (Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, 2018, on the ROCOR critique). (b) The Moscow Patriarchate view held that Sergius’s Declaration was a tragic but forced act of a Church trying to survive annihilation, not an apostasy from the faith; that the Patriarchate had never ceased to be the true Church; and that its glorification of the martyrs in 2000 — including some who had opposed Sergius — was precisely the healing of that wound, an honest reckoning with the persecution that its 2000 Council’s accompanying documents on church-state relations acknowledged (Moscow Patriarchate, Jubilee Council, 2000, and its “Bases of the Social Concept”; Christensen, 2018, ch. 5). The collection reports the dispute; the 2007 reconciliation of the two Churches, sealed in the name of the shared New Martyrs, represents a practical resolution but not a theological verdict on who was right about 1927.]

At the level of the individual case. Sergianism also bears on which persons can be glorified, and here the two Churches’ criteria diverged in a way that produced real disagreement. Some of those ROCOR venerated as martyrs and confessors had, in the 1920s–30s, broken communion with Sergius and belonged to the “Josephite” opposition or the underground “Catacomb” Church; from ROCOR’s standpoint their resistance to Sergianism was part of their confession. The Moscow Patriarchate, glorifying martyrs from within the Church that Sergius had led, had to weigh such cases differently — it could not treat opposition to its own canonical leadership as itself a mark of sanctity — and so some figures venerated in the ROCOR tradition were not glorified by Moscow, and vice versa (Christensen, 2018, ch. 5, on the divergence between the ROCOR and Moscow lists; see The Criteria and the Contested Cases). This is not a disagreement about the facts of anyone’s death but about how the ecclesiastical politics of the 1920s–30s should weigh in judging sanctity — and it is genuinely unresolved.

The Criteria, and What Is Not Adjudicated

The Moscow Patriarchate’s Commission applied, alongside the classic criterion of a death or confession for the faith, a stringent negative criterion: a candidate must not have secured his own life or lightened his sentence by betraying others — by informing, or by giving, under interrogation, the testimony the NKVD sought against fellow believers. Because the evidence for this is the interrogation file itself, and because the files can show a man breaking under torture and naming others, this criterion excluded or halted a number of cases (see The Criteria and the Contested Cases). Both Churches also had to reckon with the Renovationist schism: a cleric who had joined the state-backed Renovationists could not be venerated as a martyr of the patriarchal Church even if later shot (see The Revolution and the First Blood).

This file does not decide the questions it reports. It does not rule on whether ROCOR’s or Moscow’s category for the Royal Family is the more fitting; whether the Moscow Patriarchate was compromised or vindicated by its Sergianist inheritance; or whether a given contested figure is truly a saint. These are matters on which the two traditions of the one Russian Church have genuinely differed, on which honest scholarship and honest churchmen still differ, and on which the repository methodology forbids adjudication (METHODOLOGY §4). What the collection affirms is only what both glorifications affirm in common: that a great multitude of the Russian Church suffered and died for Christ under the atheist state, and that the Church — in both its halves, and now reconciled — venerates them as its New Martyrs and Confessors.

References

Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018. (The two glorifications; the ROCOR critique and the Moscow response; the Sergianism question; the divergence of the ROCOR and Moscow lists; the imperial canonization debate; the running totals.)
Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (Sergius’s 1927 Declaration; the ROCOR–Moscow division; the Josephite and Catacomb opposition.)
ROCOR Synod of Bishops, glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, 1 November 1981, New York. Documented in “The Order of Glorifying Saints in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (1920–2007),” rocorstudies.org, and “The Canonization of the New Martyrs by the Council of Bishops of ROCOR in 1981,” eadiocese.org. (Date, setting, scope, inclusion of the Royal Family as martyrs.)
Moscow Patriarchate, Jubilee Bishops’ Council, 13–16 August 2000, Moscow. Acts of the Council glorifying the Sobor of New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia (more than a thousand named, and the unknown) and the imperial family as passion-bearers.