Saint John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco

Saint John was born Michael Maximovitch in 1896 in southern Russia, into a noble family. A frail and serious child, deeply pious from his youth, he studied law but was drawn irresistibly to the things of God. Fleeing the Revolution, he completed his theological studies in Serbia, was tonsured a monk with the name John, and was ordained. As a seminary instructor he astonished those around him by his asceticism: it was discovered that he never lay down to sleep, taking only brief rest in a chair, and that he kept the strictest fasts.

In 1934 he was consecrated bishop and sent to Shanghai, then home to a great community of Russian refugees. There his sanctity blossomed. He built a cathedral and gathered the city’s homeless and orphaned children into an orphanage, going out himself into the worst slums to find them. He served the Liturgy daily, prayed through the nights, walked barefoot, and cared nothing for himself, yet was a firm and exacting shepherd. Many miracles of healing and uncanny foreknowledge were reported, even among those outside the Church who came to revere “the holy bishop.”

When the Communists took China, Saint John led his flock into exile. Refusing to abandon thousands of refugees stranded on a Philippine island, he traveled to Washington and, it is said, personally moved the United States Congress to admit them. He was later assigned to Western Europe, where he gathered the ancient Western saints into Orthodox veneration, and finally, in 1962, to San Francisco.

There his last and hardest years were spent. He had come to complete a great cathedral in honor of the Mother of God, “Joy of All Who Sorrow,” but was caught in painful disputes within the troubled community and was even, to his sorrow, summoned before a civil court — from which he was fully vindicated. Through it all he never ceased his prayer or his care for the suffering, slipping away to visit the sick in hospitals and prisons at all hours.

Saint John reposed on July 2, 1966, while traveling with the wonderworking Kursk-Root icon, dying in prayer before it; he had foretold the time of his death. His body, kept in the cathedral he built, was found incorrupt, and from the first, miracles multiplied at his tomb. In 1994 he was glorified, and his relics now rest in the Holy Virgin Cathedral in San Francisco, where pilgrims come from everywhere to ask his prayers. Small in stature, careless of every comfort, he is loved as one of the great wonderworkers of modern times — living proof that the age of saints is not past.

Saint John’s holiness was hidden beneath an unremarkable exterior — he was small, walked with difficulty, and spoke with an impediment — yet bishops and beggars alike sensed that they stood before a man of God. He venerated the saints of every Orthodox land and insisted that sanctity belongs to all peoples and to every age, including our own. Today churches across the world bear his name, and the faithful testify that his help, sought in prayer, is swift and real, as though the wonderworking bishop had never truly left his flock.