Saint Tikhon of Moscow

1865–1925 · 19th–20th c. · 2 works

St Tikhon of Moscow (Vasily Ivanovich Bellavin, 1865–1925) was the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and the first bishop of the Orthodox Church of America. Born in Toropets, Pskov province, to a priest's family, he entered the St Petersburg Theological Academy, and was tonsured a monk in 1891, receiving the name Tikhon. He was consecrated bishop in 1897.

From 1898 to 1907 he served as Bishop, then Archbishop, of the Aleutians and North America — the period from which all works in this collection derive. During these years he organized and greatly expanded the Orthodox mission in America: founding parishes, building churches (including the Cathedral in New York, 1902), establishing St Tikhon's Monastery in Pennsylvania (1905), consecrating St Raphael of Brooklyn (1904) as the first bishop ordained on North American soil, and nurturing the growing Slavic immigrant communities from Alaska to Florida. He moved the diocesan see from San Francisco to New York in 1905.

Returning to Russia in 1907, he served as Archbishop of Yaroslavl, then of Vilna, before being elected Patriarch of Moscow in 1917 — the first patriarch in two centuries, following the abolition of the patriarchate by Peter the Great. He shepherded the Church through the revolution and early Soviet persecution with extraordinary courage, condemning the Bolsheviks' desecration of churches and their execution of the clergy, and refusing to compromise the faith under communist pressure.

He reposed on 7 April 1925. The Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint in 1989. His relics rest in the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow. In North America he is venerated as the Enlightener of North America; St Tikhon's Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania — which he founded — remains a center of Orthodox life to this day.

Sources: Orthodox Church in America — Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow · St Tikhon's Monastery, South Canaan, Pennsylvania