A New St. Nicholas for Russians

Exile church canonizes the last Tsar and 30,000 other martyrs

Tsar Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia, would seem to some an unlikely candidate for sainthood. He consulted faith healers, intervened highhandedly in church affairs and ruled with a sublime ineffectiveness that helped pave the way for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. But last week in New York City, Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, their son and four daughters, all murdered in 1918 by the Bolsheviks, became saints. In an unprecedented ceremony of glorification, they, along with some 30,000 other Russian Orthodox Christians killed by the Soviets, were named "martyrs" and canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, a strongly anti-Communist offshoot that claims 270,000 adherents, including 150,000 in the U.S.

Orthodox theology stresses martyrdom as a sign of holiness in a potential saint. Determination of sainthood is a much less formal matter than in the Roman Catholic Church, where a lengthy, legalistic procedure emphasizes an exemplary moral life and the performance of miracles after death. An Orthodox candidate need only have suffered and died for the faith, and the Orthodox communion of saints includes hundreds of thousands of such martyrs.

The Tsar, who ruled Russia for 23 years, also served as temporal leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. His killing thus has a special significance for a church that refuses to acknowledge the present Patriarch of Moscow because of his subservience to an atheistic regime responsible for the deaths of as many as 12 million Christians. The murder of the imperial family was "not merely an act of political reprisal," wrote Metropolitan Philaret, the church's New York City-based leader, in a special epistle on the canonization, "but an act principally of the spiritual annihilation of Russian Orthodoxy."

The mass canonization came about after the church obtained from inside the Soviet Union a document verifying the circumstances of thousands of martyrs' deaths. Most died in slave-labor camps. For the final ceremony, 1,000 clergy and laity turned up, including Prince Vladimir, the Pretender to the Russian throne, and many converts: an Arab abbess, a Sioux priest from South Dakota, and two Japanese seminarians.

They all jammed into Park Avenue's handsome, red-brick Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign, which was decorated with hundreds of white, red and blue carnations, the colors of the tsarist flag.

Most stood patiently for five hours as two choirs intoned a hymn to the new saint (We glorify you, O Martyred Tsar), and gazed at a new icon commissioned for the canonization. It features Nicholas, Alexandra, and their offspring Alexis, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and the elusive Anastasia, who some observers feel survived the family slaughter. For the first time, the faithful prayed not for Nicholas' soul, but for his intercession in their behalf, as a friend of God. For the new St. Nicholas, toppled from one of the earthly realm's most powerful thrones, it was quite a comeback.

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