A Modern-Day Saint? Metropolitan Ioann and the Postsoviet Russian Orthodox Church

Abstract

The modern world tends not to produce many saints or at least, not ones officially recognised by organised religions. I And yet the reactions in 1997 to the deaths of two very different women Diana Princess of Wales and Mother Teresa of Calcutta showed that modern industrialised societies, despite their largely secular culture, still need saintly figures. The devotees of Mother Teresa regarded her as a living saint and on her death urged the Roman Catholic Church to disregard convention and canonise her immediately. Diana's death, more disturbingly, engendered an instant hagiography of a misunderstood princess who had devoted her life to 'helping others', and turned her into a candidate for popular, if not official, sainthood. The purpose of opening a paper about the Russian Orthodox Church with remarks on Princess Diana and Mother Teresa is to illustrate the fact that, despite the apparent paucity of candidates, modem, secular societies still need saintly figures. Organised religions are aware of this. Pope John Paul II has presided over a huge proliferation in Catholic canonisations, creating 276 new saints as of 1995 (although not all of them twentieth-century figures). Some of these canonisations, like those of the founder of the conservative Opus Dei movement, Mgr Escriva de Balaguer, and Edith Stein, the Jewish-born nun killed at Auschwitz, were politically controversial.2 Moreover, in March 1999 the Pope bowed to popular pressure for the canonisation of Mother Teresa by waiving the normal requirement for five years to have elapsed before the start of an investigation into a candidate's saintliness. The designation of a saint, then, has political as well as spiritual consequences. In recent years the Russian Orthodox Church has also added to its tally of modern saints. Its position has been rather different from that of the Catholic Church, because until the early 1990s it had been unable to canonise the so-called 'New Martyrs' Orthodox Christians who were executed in the Bolshevik struggle against the church. Since 1992, however, it has canonised numerous church leaders in apparently methodical fashion. The first group of new saints (canonised in 1992) included two metropolitans executed shortly after the 1917 Revolution; whilst the group canonised at the Bishops' Council in February 1997 included three bishops who died during the Great Purge of 1937. Despite the new freedom to canonise victims of the Soviet regime, however, naming new Russian Orthodox saints can still be a politically sensitive business. Nowhere was this better illustrated than in the fiasco over the burial of Nicholas 11 in 1998. In February 1998 the Holy Synod refused to endorse the conclusions of a Russian State Commission which had confirmed that, according to DNA evidence, the human