Category True Orthodoxy

If salt loses its flavor

The Bland Taste of a Salt-less Meal

Archbishop Averky of Syracuse and Jordanville concerning the “Salt of the Earth” As salt preserves food from decay and makes it healthful and pleasant to the taste, so too true Christians preserve the world from moral decay and facilitate its…

A Hollow Sound

Archbishop Averky of Syracuse and Jordanville A terrible, unrelieved, hopeless unscrupulousness has taken possession of many people. The true doctrine of the faith and the Church for which the first Christians died in such tortures has become a hollow sound…

HIEROMARTYR INNOCENT, BISHOP OF THE DON

Bishop Innocent (in the world Alexis Pokhorovich Shishkin) was born in 1878 in the village of Shostka, Rodninsky uyezd, Sedletskaya province (Poland). In 1916 he graduated from St. Petersburg Theological Academy and went to serve as a priest in Novocherkassk. On February 30, 1923 he was arrested for not submitting to the local renovationist diocesan administration, and on March 30 was sentenced to three years in the camps. He was imprisoned on Solovki. On March 13, 1926 he was released and went to serve in the Kuban. From the beginning of 1928 he was in opposition to Metropolitan Sergius and joined the Josephites. From 1928 to 1929 he was an assistant to Bishop Alexis (Buj), carrying out the duties of dean of part of the Josephite parishes in the Kuban, where he helped Bishop Barlaam (Lazarenko). He lived in Yeisk, Krasnodar province. He was arrested in 1928, but was soon released. In November, 1929 he went to serve in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in Petrograd, but from the beginning of 1930 was in hiding, going from place to place and serving in secret. In 1930 he was consecrated Bishop of the Don (according to another source, of Yeisk) by the Catacomb Bishops Alexis (Buj), Barlaam (Lazarenko) and Joasaph (Popov). He lived in Novocherkassk, but never slept more than two nights in one place, being constantly pursued. In 1936 he went to his mother’s grave in Rostov-on-Don, and was arrested there on October 7. He was imprisoned in Rostov, and on May 21, 1937 was sentenced to five years in the camps. He was sent to Ukhtpechlag, Komi republic, arriving there on September 10. At the end of 1937 he was living in the village of Vogvazdino, Ust-Vymsk region, where he was arrested again on December 29, 1937. On February 15, 1938 he was sentenced to be shot. The sentence was carried out on March 21, 1938. (Sources: Archbishop Lazarus of Tambov, Pravoslavnaya Rus’, N 22 (1451), November 15/28, 1991, p. 5; Bishop Ambrose (von Sievers), “Episkopat Istinno-Pravoslavnoj Katakombnoj Tserkvi 1922-1997g.”, Russkoye Pravoslaviye, N 4(8), 1997, p. 7; M.V. Shkarovsky, Iosiflyanstvo, St. Petersburg, 1999,

“In All of This, There Can Be Discerned Some Kind of Rationally Acting Black Hand Which Is Working to Bind People as Tightly as Possible to This Temporary, Earthly Life by Forcing Them to Forget the Future Life, the Eternal Life Assuredly Awaiting Us All.” -Archbishop Averky of Syracuse

We are living in a strange time, when all the true and healthy Christian concepts are being replaced by false and deceitful concepts, discovered often with an evil intention with the undoubted intention, naturally, of drawing people away from the…