The relics of St. Sabbas the Sanctified were returned to his lavra on this day in 1965. On November 9, I mentioned that the “mills of God grind slowly.” Here is another example of how this adage holds. In 1965, the Ecumenical Patriarch and Archbishop of Constantinople, Athenagoras I (d. 1972), and Pope Paul VI of Rome (d. 1978), canceled the mutual anathemas of 1054. For the Russian Church Abroad, this event had significant consequences. Reacting to this unprecedented, unilateral decision of the Phanar, Metropolitan Philaret stopped having any relations, even diplomatic ones, with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and the ROCOR began to receive clergy from it without their having been canonically released. However, there is always a silver lining. As a result of this cancellation, the relics taken by the Crusaders began gradually to be returned to the places from which they had been plundered. One such saint who “returned home” in this way was Sabbas the Sanctified. St. Sabbas lived in the 5th-6th century in the Eastern Roman Empire. He became a reformer of the monastic life in Palestine, providing the first written Typikon for monasteries, which has not survived. This Typikon influenced the liturgical practices of the Byzantine Church. St. Sabbas and his disciples founded seven lavra-type and six koinobia-type monasteries. (A lavra combines eremitic and communal lifestyles, while a koinobia is communal only.) With their adherence to the dogma of the Council of Chalcedon (451) and to anti-Origenism, the fathers of the Judean desert rendered an indispensable service in defending the Orthodox faith. This was especially the case after the Islamic invasion of the seventh century, when belonging to the Roman Empire could no longer be a common denominator for identity. (On this, see my post about St. Maximos the Confessor.) On par with St. Catherine Monastery on Mount Sinai, St. Sabbas’s lavra in the Judean desert has existed continuously as a monastery since Byzantine times. The relics of St. Sabbas were taken as a result of a conflict over land ownership in Palestine with the “Italian” Crusaders in the twelfth (?) century. Source: E.V. Tkachev, “Lavra,” Pravoslavnaia Entsiklopedia. | 
