St. Matrona of Moscow

St. Matrona of Moscow was born Matrona Nikonova in 1881 into a poor peasant family in the Russian province of Tula. Blind from birth and later, in her youth, deprived of the use of her legs, she bore her afflictions without complaint and was granted from childhood remarkable spiritual gifts, so that even as a girl people came to her for prayer and counsel, sensing in her a nearness to God that more than made up for her want of sight.

Through the long night of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet persecution of the Church, when believers were harried and churches closed, she lived in poverty and often in hiding, moving from place to place in and around Moscow, receiving the stream of the suffering, the sick, and the frightened who sought her, consoling them, praying over them, and, it was said, foretelling things to come. She died on 2 May 1952. Glorified as a saint in 1999, she has become one of the most beloved and widely venerated intercessors in modern Russia.