Witnesses of Our Time

Vladimir Lossky

1903 – 1958

Lay Theologian

A layman of the Russian emigration in Paris whose Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944) put the apophatic tradition and the doctrine of deification back at the centre of how Orthodoxy explains itself.

Metropolitan Antony (Bashir)

1898 – 1966

Metropolitan & Translator

Primate of the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America for thirty years, who took a scattered immigrant jurisdiction and made it an organized American church — and who insisted on English in its services and its press decades before that was a settled question.

Fr. Georges Florovsky

1893 – 1979

Priest & Theologian

A Russian émigré priest, church historian and theologian who called the Church to a “neo-patristic synthesis” — a return to the Fathers — while teaching at St Vladimir's, Harvard and Princeton.

Archimandrite Lev Gillet

“A Monk of the Eastern Church”

1893 – 1980

Priest & Spiritual Writer

A French Catholic who met Orthodoxy among Russian prisoners of war, entered the Church in 1928, and became rector of the first French-speaking Orthodox parish in the world.

Fr. Michael Gelsinger

1890 – 1980

Priest & Translator

A convert from Lutheranism and professor of classics at the University of Buffalo, whose scholarly specialty was Byzantine liturgics and hymnology — remembered as one of the most influential convert clergymen in American Orthodox history.

Hieromonk Seraphim

Rose, of Platina

1934 – 1982

Monk & Writer

An American convert and co-founder of the St Herman of Alaska Monastery in California whose writings opened the door of Orthodoxy to a whole generation of English-speaking seekers.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann

1921 – 1983

Priest & Theologian

Dean of St Vladimir's Seminary and author of “For the Life of the World,” whose liturgical theology renewed the Eucharistic life of Orthodox Christians across America and far beyond.

Mother Alexandra

Princess Ileana

1909 – 1991

Monastic Foundress

Born Princess Ileana of Romania, she embraced monastic life in America and founded the Monastery of the Transfiguration in Pennsylvania — a haven of prayer for Orthodox women.

Fr. John Meyendorff

1926 – 1992

Priest & Theologian

A patristic scholar of St Gregory Palamas and dean of St Vladimir's Seminary, whose learning and witness helped a self-governing Orthodox Church take root in America.

Evgeny Rodionov

1977 – 1996

Soldier

A nineteen-year-old Russian conscript beheaded in Chechen captivity in 1996, by the account of his captors after refusing to remove his baptismal cross or renounce Christ.

Bishop Basil

Rodzianko

1915 – 1999

Bishop & Radio Missionary

A Russian émigré bishop whose decades of radio broadcasts carried the Gospel to listeners across the Soviet Union, and who served his last years as an OCA bishop in America.

Fr. John Romanides

1927 – 2001

Priest & Theologian

A Greek-American priest and theologian, raised in New York, who became an influential and controversial voice in modern Orthodox thought — known for his sharp distinction between the Orthodox East and the Frankish-Augustinian West and for his emphasis on the patristic “cure of the soul.”

Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom)

of Sourozh

1914 – 2003

Metropolitan & Writer on Prayer

A surgeon in the French army and a volunteer in the Resistance who was secretly tonsured a monk in 1943 and told, since no monastery was open to him, to keep eight hours of prayer a day while going on with his medical work.

Archbishop Iakovos (Coucouzis)

1911 – 2005

Archbishop of America

Primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America for thirty-seven years, and the most publicly visible Orthodox hierarch in American history. On 15 March 1965 he walked beside Dr Martin Luther King Jr at Selma, and the photograph of the two of them ran on the cover of Life.

Archbishop Job (Osacky)

1946 – 2009

Archbishop of Chicago

Archbishop of Chicago and the Midwest, remembered above all for asking aloud, in a room of bishops who would not, whether the allegations of financial misconduct in his Church's central administration were true.

Archbishop Dmitri

Royster

1923 – 2011

Missionary Hierarch

A Texan convert from a Baptist family who became founding bishop of the Diocese of the South, planting and nurturing scores of mission parishes across the American South.

Fr. Peter Gillquist

1938 – 2012

Priest & Missionary

A Campus Crusade for Christ regional director who spent two decades leading a company of evangelicals out of the house-church movement and into the ancient Church, and who in 1987 brought some two thousand of them into the Antiochian Archdiocese — the largest single reception of converts in American Orthodox history.

Dr. Constance Tarasar

1938 – 2014

Educator & Historian

The first woman admitted to a degree programme at St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, who graduated in 1965 with a thesis on the place of women in the Church and returned to teach there for more than thirty years.

Metropolitan Philip

Saliba

1931 – 2014

Antiochian Hierarch

The long-serving Metropolitan of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, who led it through decades of dramatic growth and, in 1987, received a large body of former evangelicals into the Orthodox Church.

Archimandrite Roman

Braga

1922 – 2015

Confessor & Elder

A Romanian priest imprisoned and tortured under communism who, having found inner freedom in his cell, carried that joy to America and shaped monastic life in Michigan.

Fr. Thomas Hopko

of St Vladimir's

1939 – 2015

Priest & Theologian

A beloved teacher, preacher and dean of St Vladimir's Seminary whose lectures, books and “55 maxims” formed generations of English-speaking Orthodox Christians.

Elder Dobri Dobrev

“the Saint of Bailovo”

1914 – 2018

Almsgiver

A Bulgarian villager who from about the age of eighty-five walked some twenty kilometres to Sofia to beg in the streets, and gave every coin away to churches and monasteries while living on a pension of a few dozen lev a month.

Elder Aimilianos (Vafeidis)

of Simonopetra

1934 – 2019

Abbot & Spiritual Father

Abbot of Simonopetra on Mount Athos from 1974 to 2000, who brought a young brotherhood from the emptying monasteries of Meteora to a Holy Mountain then near collapse, and left it full.

Elder Ephraim

of Arizona

1928 – 2019

Athonite Elder

A disciple of St Joseph the Hesychast who, coming from Mount Athos, founded seventeen Orthodox monasteries across the United States and Canada — reviving traditional monastic life on the continent.

Metropolitan Theodosius (Lazor)

1933 – 2020

Primate of the OCA

The first American-born primate of the Orthodox Church in America, who as a young Bishop of Alaska headed the delegation that brought home the Tomos of Autocephaly in 1970 and then hosted the glorification of St Herman — the first saint of North America entered into the calendar.

Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware)

of Diokleia

1934 – 2022

Bishop & Theologian

An Anglican schoolboy who wandered into a Russian vigil in London, was received into the Orthodox Church at twenty-four, and became the first Englishman consecrated an Orthodox bishop since the Great Schism.

Fr. Michael Oleksa

1947 – 2023

Priest & Educator

A missionary priest, teacher and storyteller who spent decades among the peoples of Alaska — a leading interpreter of Alaska Native cultures and of the deep Orthodox history rooted in that land.