St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco passed away on that day in 1966. Today is the thirtieth anniversary of St. John’s glorification. It took place in 1994, twenty-eight years after St. John’s repose. It was a “textbook” case of canonization. Through miracles and widespread veneration, God had been showing that St. John was his chosen vessel. It is a telling fact that although the then ROCOR’s first hierarch, Metropolitan Vitaly (1910 - 2006), was on the side of St. John’s opponents during the saint's lifetime, he nevertheless decided to go ahead with this glorification. In 1998, I was at St. Catherine Monastery on Mount Sinai. There, a Greek lay worker from Chicago asked me a question. He said, “When Archbishop Damianos of Sinai serves, he commemorates the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and when the Patriarch of Jerusalem serves, he commemorates other Orthodox patriarchs. When Metropolitan Vitaly serves, whom does he commemorate?” My answer was: “The Orthodox Episcopate of the persecuted Russian Church.” His question hinted toward the troubled events in the history of the Russian Church in the twentieth century, leading to the canonically unprecedented independent existence of the Russian émigré Church. The canons express many aspects of theological truth, but one cannot expect to find answers about the reality of the Church’s existence in all possible circumstances. Under this angle, this Greek layworker might have had a point implying that the ROCOR was uncanonical. However, I would ask: “What do you mean by this?” Then I may say that St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco is a proof that shows how the Russian Church Abroad has been a salvific branch of the Orthodox Church. The Russian refugees after the 1917 Revolution were mainly stateless. Shanghai, where St. John arrived in 1934 after his episcopal consecration in Serbia, was divided into the French and British districts. They had their own "colonial" administration, and people lived there as if they were in England or France. The Russians were left on their own, with no country behind them. The morale sometimes was low. For these “rejects of the world,” St. John became both father and mother. The building of the orphanage he established in Shanghai still exists now in San Francisco. The relatively new book by John B. Dunlop, Exodus: St John Maximovitch Leads His Flock Out of Shanghai (SVS Press: Crestwood, NY: 2017), contains archival evidence of how St. John “lobbied” in Washington, DC, for the admission of his flock to the US. Thirty years after his canonization, St. John's is a universally venerated Orthodox saint comparable to St. Seraphim of Sarov. This is evidence of ROCOR's canonicity. The mitered Archpriest George Larin, St. John's acolyte in Shanghai, came to the seminary in Jordanville from Australia because St. John remembered writing him. As for Metropolitans of the ROCOR Laurus and Hilarion, St. John did not profile people into important and unimportant ones, and this is also why he is the best of the best of the Russian Church Abroad. Relevant Resources on ROCOR Studies: Matushka Maria Potapov, "I Remember How the Unfortunate Were Always Surrounding Him" Maria Reshetnikova, "St. John Didn’t Go in for Compromises, Neither With Himself Nor With Situations" Protodeacon Andrei Psarev, "A Model of Meekness, and a Teacher of Temperance” | 
