Q4102834

Varnava Nastić, born Vojislav Nastić, was a Serbian Orthodox bishop of the twentieth century and the first person born in the United States to be glorified as a saint by the Serbian Orthodox Church. He was born on 31 January 1914 in Gary, Indiana, to Atanasije and Zorka Nastić, Serbian immigrants from Herzegovina. In 1923 the family returned to Sarajevo in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where he completed secondary school. He then studied at the Orthodox Theological Faculty of the University of Belgrade, graduating in the late 1930s, and taught at the seminary in Sarajevo before entering monastic life.

In 1940 he was tonsured a monk with the name Varnava (Barnabas) and ordained deacon and priest. He served during the Second World War in Bosnia, in territory that became the Independent State of Croatia, where the Serbian Orthodox Church and Serb civilians were subjected to severe persecution. After the war, in 1947, he was consecrated Bishop of Hvosno, a titular see used for a vicar bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church. At about thirty-three years of age he was the youngest man ever raised to the episcopate in that church.

Under the communist government of Yugoslavia he refused to accept political control of church affairs. He was arrested in 1948 and imprisoned on political charges, including accusations connected with his American birth. After years in prison and further restrictions on his ministry, he lived mainly in monasteries rather than in a free public episcopal role. Church tradition regards him as a confessor of the faith who would not subordinate the Church to the state.

He died on 12 November 1964 at Beočin Monastery on Fruška Gora, at the age of fifty. Later church memory has associated his death with possible poisoning by the Yugoslav secret police, though that claim has not been established as a public judicial finding. In 2005 the Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint. He is commemorated on 12 November (30 October on the Julian calendar). He is remembered as an American-born hierarch of the Serbian Church who suffered under mid-twentieth-century communist rule.