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| St. Victor of Glazov |
St. Victor of Glazov was a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church. After the Sergianist schism in 1927 he, after becoming the 1st bishop to protest against the "declaration" of Metropolitan Sergius, became a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Catacomb Church. He died, in exile, in 1934 after suffering many long years of imprisonment and torments. In 1997 his relics were discovered to be incorrupt! May we have his holy prayers!
What follows is but a single incident from the Life of St. Victor which manifests both the true holiness and genuine spiritual authority of the Saint:
"Immediately after the arrest, the interrogations began. The investigators demanded of Vladyka [Victor] that he implicate other arrestees. For the first eight days of interrogations, he was not permitted to sit or sleep. A protocol with absurd accusations and false testimony was prepared ahead of time, and day after day the interrogators, one after the other, kept repeating the same thing, screaming in the prisoner’s ear, “Sign it! Sign it! Sign it!”
However, Vladyka, having prayed, made the sign of the Cross over the interrogator, and something akin to an attack of demonic possession occurred: the interrogator began to jump up and down strangely and to shake. The bishop prayed and asked the Lord not to let any harm come to that man. The attack soon ceased, but with that the interrogator again started on Vladyka, demanding that he sign the protocol. However, all his efforts were in vain—the hierarch did not agree to slander himself or others."
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Below are 4 excerpts from the letters of St. Victor on "blessed disobedience":
Excerpt 1: "So what must we do now? In the opinion of the apostates themselves, we must as it were become accomplices in their crime against the Orthodox Church, and consequently, we, like they, must subject ourselves to God's judgment and even before the judgement deprive ourselves of the Grace of salvation. But how can we justify ourselves before God for participating in sin?"
Excerpt 2: "But their threatening with canonical sanctions is only a trap for the ignorant and faint-hearted. After all, the canons were not given by the Holy Fathers, so that by their means, as with a whip, to drive to their destruction those who declare that they, out of fear of God, cannot follow someone taught by the enemy-devil."
Excerpt 3: "True, we, as men, are subject to spiritual authority. But at the same time each one of us is directed in his life by the commandments of God, in accordance with which we shall be judged, and if we turn out to be accomplices in the impiety of our spiritual authorities, even if that should be in the person of the Patriarch himself, then in no way can we be justified before God. For the commandment of God declares: ‘He who renounces Me before men, I will renounce before My Heavenly Father’ (Matthew 10.33)."
Excerpt 4: "My friends, if we truly believe that outside of the Orthodox Church a man has no salvation, then when her truth is perverted we cannot remain her indifferent worshippers in the dark, but we must confess before everyone the truth of the Church. And if others, even in an innumerable multitude, even chief hierarchs, remain indifferent and can even use their interdictions against us, there is nothing surprising in this.
After all, this has happened not infrequently in the past, and thus it was four years ago that those who had fallen away from the truth composed councils and called themselves the Church of God and, pretending to be concerned over canons, made interdictions against those who did not submit to their senselessness; but they did all this to their shame and to their eternal perdition."
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| St. Victor of Glazov |