St. John of Kronstadt

St. John of Kronstadt was born Ivan Sergiev on 19 October 1829 in a poor village of the far north of Russia, the son of a village sacristan. Ordained a priest in 1855, he was assigned to the naval city of Kronstadt on an island near St. Petersburg, then a place of grinding poverty, exile, and vice, and there he spent his entire ministry of more than fifty years as a parish priest.

Unlike the retiring clergy of his day, he threw himself into the slums, feeding, clothing, and sheltering the destitute, founding a "House of Industry" to give them work and dignity, and giving away all that passed through his hands. A man of burning, tearful prayer, especially in the daily celebration of the Divine Liturgy, he was granted such evident gifts of healing that thousands flocked to him from across the empire, and his spiritual diary, My Life in Christ, became a treasured classic. He died on 20 December 1908 and was glorified as a saint in 1990.