BELAVIN, TIKHON

BELAVIN, TIKHON, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, American missionary, martyr, St. (19 January 1865–7 April 1925). Baptized Basil, he graduated from the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1888 and was appointed to the faculty of the Pskov Theological Seminary. Tonsured a monk and ordained priest in 1891, he became rector of the Kazan and Kholm Theological Seminaries, and in 1897 was made archimandrite and consecrated Bishop of Lublin.

In 1898 he was appointed Bishop of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska with the bishop’s seat in San Francisco. Arriving at age thirty-three as one of the youngest hierarchs of the Russian Church, he entered his cathedral church in San Francisco on 23 December. In evaluating his archpastoral assignment, three difficult circumstances stand out: 1) The Missionary Diocese included Alaska, Canada, and the U.S., and was too big to successfully administrate; 2) this diocese of the Russian Church included all ethnic Orthodox from throughout the world, a huge diversity of languages and cultures; and 3) neither New York, Chicago, nor San Francisco had proper church buildings. In response to this circumstance, in 1902 two cathedrals were completed in New York, one Russian, one Syrian. In 1903 Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago was completed, as designed by Louis Sullivan. (This is the only Sullivan church in the world-built under the supervision of Fr. Joh n Kochurov [q.v.].)

In 1903 to 1904 Tikhon successfully established an auxiliary bishopric in Alaska with its cathedral at Sitka and an auxiliary bishopric of Brooklyn for the Syro-Arabic Mission for which Archimandrite Raphael Hawaweeny (q.v.) was consecrated; at the same time, the Greek Holy Trinity parish in New York became the private property of three Greek laymen. In 1905 the episcopal see was transferred from San Francisco to New York and Tikhon was made archbishop. In 1906, after the San Francisco earthquake, Tikhon acquired the present site of Holy Trinity Cathedral, San Francisco (completed in 1909), one of the oldest Orthodox parishes in the western hemisphere.

In 1905 he assisted in the founding of the first Orthodox seminary in the continental United States, located in Minneapolis. The next year he published his project for a multinational and autocephalous Orthodox Church for America and commissioned and published The Service Book of the Holy Orthodox Catholic Church translated by Isabel F. Hapgood, long the only comprehensive church service book in English. In 1907 he convened the first All-American Council in Mayfield, Pennsylvania, after which he left for Russia.

That year, he was appointed to the see of Iaroslavl’, Russia, and in 1914 to the see of Vilno. On 23 June 1917 he was elected to the see of Moscow by the diocesan assembly and granted the title of metropolitan. In 1917 to 1918 the Church Council elected Tikhon presiding bishop of the first general Council of the Russian Church since the time of Peter the Great; and he was elected Patriarch of Moscow and All-Russia on 18 November, the former patriarch ruling in the 17th c. From this time through 1925, he defended the Church and its people from the Bolsheviks, terror, and political abuse, himself being imprisoned. He did appeal for obedience to legitimate decrees of the Soviet state. The evening he died, his prophetic last words were, “Now I will sleep . . . for the night will be long.” He was canonized in Russia only after the collapse of Soviet communism.