Justin Popović

Justin Popović, known in monastic life as Archimandrite Justin and after his glorification as Saint Justin of Ćelije, was born Blagoje Popović on 6 April 1894 in Vranje in the Kingdom of Serbia. He belonged to a family in which the priesthood had been handed down for generations; his father Spiridon was a parish priest and his mother Anastasija a pious Orthodox Christian. After primary schooling in his native town he entered the Seminary of Saint Sava in Belgrade, completing his studies there in 1914 just as the First World War began. Serving as a medical orderly with the Serbian army, he took part in the arduous retreat through Montenegro and Albania. In 1916, at Shkodër, he received the monastic tonsure and was given the name Justin, after the second-century philosopher and martyr.

The young monk was sent to continue his education first at the Theological Academy in Petrograd. The Russian Revolution of 1917 compelled him to leave, and he proceeded to Oxford, where he worked on a dissertation concerning the philosophy of Fyodor Dostoevsky. When that thesis was not accepted he moved to Greece and in 1926 was awarded a doctorate by the University of Athens for a study of the problem of personality and knowledge according to Saint Macarius of Egypt. Back in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia he taught at the seminaries of Sremski Karlovci, Prizren and Bitola, gaining a reputation as a rigorous patristic scholar and a compelling preacher. In 1934 he was appointed professor of dogmatics at the Theological Faculty of the University of Belgrade, a position he occupied until wartime conditions closed the faculty.

After the communist takeover of Yugoslavia, Popović was barred from university teaching and from most public activity. From 1948 onward he resided at the isolated Monastery of Ćelije in the hills near Valjevo, serving as confessor to the nuns and remaining under constant surveillance. There he devoted himself to writing. His principal works include a three-volume Orthodox Dogmatics, a complete twelve-volume Serbian menologion of the lives of the saints, commentaries on the epistles of Saint Paul, and a series of essays sharply critical of the ecumenical movement, which he considered a betrayal of Orthodox ecclesiology. He maintained that the Orthodox Church is the one and only Church of Christ and rejected any notion of a divided Christendom that could be reassembled by inter-confessional negotiation.

Archimandrite Justin died at Ćelije on 7 April 1979, the day after his eighty-fifth birthday, and was buried in the monastery courtyard. His books, copied and circulated despite official disapproval, exercised a lasting influence on Orthodox theology in Serbia and among the diaspora. In 2010 the Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church entered his name in the diptychs of saints. He is commemorated on 14 June and is venerated as a confessor, theologian and spiritual father. His relics rest at Ćelije Monastery, which has become a place of pilgrimage.