Today is the day of the repose of Bishop St. Basil of Kineshma, from the Volga region of Russia. Veniamin Preobrazhenskii (his secular name) was born in 1876 into the family of a priest. He graduated from Kostroma Seminary and then from Kiev Academy. While studying in England, Veniamin got involved in the scouting movement and became a proponent of it in Russia. With his linguistic abilities in ancient and modern languages, Veniamin taught Latin at a Moscow gymnasium. After the wave of persecution broke out in 1920, he became a celibate priest. The following year, Veniamin became a monk and was consecrated Bishop of Kineshma, a vicar of the Diocese of Kostroma. When, in 1927, Metropolitan Sergii (Stragorodskii), the deputy to Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsy (Locum Tenens of the Patriarchal Throne), issued his apology for loyalty to the Soviet state, Basil disagreed with this declaration. He remained in ecclesiastical union with the holy hierarchs, metropolitans, Agathangel of Yaroslavl and Kirill of Kazan. Bishop Basil was an ascetic and a gifted preacher. Here is a vivid account from his vita illustrating what his decision to serve Christ could mean daily. During his last exile in Siberia following his arrest in 1943, St. Basil lived at the house of a widow with three children. “When he prayed, they rolled little balls of horse manure across the floor at him, finally pelting him with them crying, ‘Here Grandpa, eat’” (Saint Basil Bishop of Kineshma, A Guiding Light. Reading, CA, 1988, p. 26). He died in August 1945, apparently not in communion with Patriarch Aleksei (Simanskii), who had been elected at the local council of the Russian Church in February of the same year. In 1981, Bishop Basil was canonized by the Russian Church Abroad. In 1985, his relics were unearthed by Russian Catacomb Christians. In 1988, Fr. Victor Potapov smuggled abroad a piece of St. Basil’s relics along with the life of St. Basil written by Vladimir Orlovskii. The ROCOR published it in Russian and English. In 1996, Vladimir (in monasticism Damaskin) published the life of St. Basil in the second volume of his collection of lives of the new martyrs, titled Martyrs, Confessors, and Strugglers of Piety of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Twentieth Century (Mucheniki, ispovedniki i podvizhniki blagochestiia Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi XX stoletiia), without mentioning Basil’s opposition to Metropolitan Sergii. In 1993, Patriarch Alexis II blessed the local veneration of St. Basil, and his relics were transferred to the Convent of the Entrance into the Temple in Ivanovo, in central Russia. In 2000, St. Basil was canonized for church-wide veneration at the Local Council of the Russian Church. In 2012, acting on the directive of Patriarch Kirill, Archimandrite Damaskin, the secretary to the commission for canonization of the Russian Orthodox Church, had the relics of St. Basil removed from the convent, and his name was removed from the liturgical calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, it remains in the calendar of the Russian Church Abroad. Usually, the names of new martyrs are removed because new compromising evidence has come to light from their case files. However, the information in these files can sometimes be misleading. |
