Macarius Nevsky

Macarius Nevsky, born Mikhail Andreyevich Nevsky, was a Russian Orthodox hierarch, missionary, and translator who served as Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna in the last years of the imperial period and was later glorified as a saint. He was born on 1 October 1835 in the village of Shapkino, in the Kovrov district of Vladimir Governorate, into the family of a parish church reader. Raised in modest clerical surroundings, he received his education in the church schools of the Vladimir diocese and at the Vladimir Theological Seminary. Rather than remaining in a central Russian parish or pursuing an academic path, he volunteered as a young man for the Altai Spiritual Mission in southern Siberia and arrived in the Altai in the mid-nineteenth century, beginning decades of work among the indigenous Altaian population.

In the Altai he learned the local language and took part in translating the Scriptures, liturgical books, and catechetical texts for use in mission churches and schools. He was tonsured a monk with the name Macarius and ordained to the priesthood, serving as a hieromonk in remote mission settlements. His labors, together with those of other members of the mission, helped form an Altaian Orthodox community with baptisms, schools, and a growing native flock, and he became widely known as a leading figure of the Altai mission. In the 1880s he was consecrated to the episcopate as Bishop of Biysk, a vicar of the Tomsk diocese, and placed at the head of the mission. He later occupied the see of Tomsk itself, serving as bishop and then archbishop of that vast Siberian diocese through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In 1912 he was appointed Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna, one of the principal sees of the Russian Church during the Synodal period, and a member of the Holy Governing Synod. His tenure in Moscow was brief and fell in the troubled final years of the Romanov monarchy. Identified with conservative ecclesiastical and political currents, he was retired from the Moscow cathedra in 1917 after the February Revolution, when the synod under the new political order removed several hierarchs regarded as closely tied to the old regime. He spent his remaining years in retirement and monastic seclusion, latterly in the village of Kotelniki near Moscow.

Metropolitan Macarius died in 1926 in Kotelniki at an advanced age and was buried at the local church. He was remembered among the faithful as a man of prayer, an ascetic hierarch, and a missionary translator of the Altai. In 2000 the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint. He is commemorated as a hierarch and enlightener associated with the Altai mission and with the saints of Moscow, and his life is cited as an example of missionary monasticism in the Siberian missions of the nineteenth century.