Archpriest Liverii Vornov passed away on this day in 1995. Liverii was born 1914 into a clerical family. Archbishop Feofan (Bystrov) of Poltava, Rector of Saint Petersburg Theological Academy and later an influential hierarch of the ROCOR, was his uncle. Fr. Liverii represents the new reality of the Church surviving the first decades under the Soviet regime. A Soviet law of 1929 prohibited teenagers from studying religion anywhere outside of their families. Therefore, the main criterion after World War II for appointing candidates to key church positions was not education, but their having been brought up in clergy families. Before World War II Metropolitan Georgii (Chukov) and Archbishop Nikolai (Larushevich) were Fr. Liverii’s tutors. In the fall of 1941, Liverii was visiting his parents along with his wife in Vyritsa, 60 kilometers from Saint Petersburg. The town was taken over by the Wehrmacht. Thus, Liverii continued to serve the Russian Church, albeit under a different regime. In 1943, Metropolitan Sergii (Voskresenskii) of Vilnus and Lithuania ordained Liverii a priest in occupied Pskov. Fr. Liverii became a member of the so-called Pskov Mission, which contained mostly clergy from the Baltic ministering in Pskov Region, where the churches had been closed during the pre-war decades. This “collaboration” with the occupiers cost Fr. Liverii his freedom. In September 1944, Tallinn, where Fr. Liverii was located at this time, was taken over by the Soviet Army (he decided not to leave with the Germans). The next month, Fr. Liverii was arrested, and in January 1945, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his involvement with the Pskov Mission. In 1955, Fr. Liverii was released. He went through the distance-learning track at Leningrad Seminary and then graduated from the Academy. He then taught dogmatics and early church history there. The task for the seminary teachers in Russia after World War II was the same as in Jordanville: to produce textbooks suitable for a new generation of students. Accordingly, Fr. Michael Pomazansky put together a textbook on Dogmatic Theology for Holy Trinity Seminary, and so did his Russian “counterpart” in this respect, Fr. Liverii. Fr. Liverii was actively involved in various instances of ecumenical dialogue inside and outside the Soviet Union. If one is being honest, the church did use this international activity to prove its usefulness to the Soviet regime. Therefore, these dialogues were not purely theological events. Source: Archpriest Nikolai Preobrazhenskii, “Voronov,” Pravoslavnaia Entsiklopedia. | 
