The Shepherd, May 2007
NEWS SECTION
SACRED RELICS UNCOVERED
CREDO.RU reports that the sacred relics of Saint Maria of Gatchina, which lay in the Smolensk Cemetery in St Petersburg, were uncovered on 26th March this year, and placed in the church at Gatchina. Besides her relics a portion of her monastic mantia and belt, and her paramand cross were found in the grave. The Schemanun, St Maria, was born Lydia Alexandrovna Lelyanova in 1874. She suffered from encephalitis and Parkinson’s Disease and was a complete invalid, hardly able to speak. However, though suffering physically, she remained spiritually whole, and devoted herself to prayer. She was granted the spiritual gift of being able to comfort and console people, and many resorted to her for help and prayer. She refused to accept the infamous declaration of Metropolitan Sergius in 1927, and placed herself under the spiritual protection of the Josephites. For this, in 1930, she was dragged out of her tiny cottage by the Chekhists and thrown into the back of a truck and taken into custody. A month later she was reported dead. It is, however, now reported that she died on 5th April, 1932. On the 19th April this year, Metropolitan Vladimir of St Petersburg and Ladoga (MP) officiated at a glorification of the Holy New Martyr. As one commentator has remarked, her sacred relics are being used to draw people to visit a church she herself would have never set foot in.
PROTESTS IN BELGRADE
THERE were reported to be public protests before the Patriarchate in Belgrade on Holy Tuesday this year. The people were protesting about liturgical changes being introduced by the episcopate, and according to “Church Affairs,” were planning more protests after Pascha. The Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church had proposed that the secret prayers in the Liturgy be read aloud, and that the doors of the iconostas be left open. The leading clergy in the Sumadija Diocese are reported to have refused to implement these innovations and have been suspended by their bishop, and so their churches were to be left without Holy Week and Bright Week services. The monasteries have also refused to introduce the changes.
TOMB OF REVERED ARCHBISHOP FOUND IN MOSCOW
RIA NEWS reported on 13/04/07 that in Moscow the tomb of the Greek educator of the second half of the XVIII century, Archbishop Nikiforos Feotokis, had been found at the St. Daniel Monastery, according to the abbot of the monastery, Archimandrite Aleksiy. He said, “Nikiforos Feotokis was a devotee of the faith and piety. He had been for eight years the superior of the St. Daniel monastery and died in the monastery.” St Ignaty (Brianchaninov) and St Macarius of Optina, who are especially esteemed in Russia, advised believers to read his works. The grave of Feotokis, who was a native of Corfu, had become a place of pilgrimage, but after the destruction of the monastery cemetery in the 1930s it was lost. From the end of the 1980s, as soon as they were free to do so, searches for the burial place began.
BISHOP KALLISTOS (WARE) ELEVATED
THE FRIENDS of Mount Athos newsletter, April 2007, announces that their President has been elevated to Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia. To celebrate this and the twenty-fifth anniversary of his consecration to the episcopate, FoMA is holding a special buffet supper for their members on 28th May.
WALSINGHAM CHAPEL SAVED
WE HEAR through private correspondence, that through the generous action of a parishioner the Saint Seraphim Chapel at the former Brotherhood in Little Walsingham has been saved. The Brotherhood of Saint Seraphim of Sarov was founded in 1966 by the then Father Mark Meyrick, later Archimandrite David. The chapel in the former railway station was blessed by the late Archbishop Nikodem of Richmond on the Summer feast of St Seraphim the following year. In 1977, the Brotherhood transferred from the the Church Abroad to the Moscow Patriarchate, and with the establishment in this country of Œcumenical Patriarchate’s Exarchate of Orthodox Parishes of Russian Tradition in Western Europe last year, the Chapel placed itself under that jurisdiction. This move might have jeopardised their chances of raising funds enough to purchase the property which hitherto was rented, but the generous action of their supporter has saved the chapel. 
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