Q4142256

Saint Gabriel, born Goderdzi Urgebadze on 26 August 1929 in Tbilisi in what was then the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, grew up amid the militant atheism of the Stalinist and post-Stalin Soviet period. His father was killed while Goderdzi was still a child, and he was raised in poverty by his mother. From an early age he displayed an intense attraction to Orthodox Christianity: he collected icons, constructed a small chapel in the family courtyard, and spoke openly of the faith to other children even though such activity was dangerous. He was baptized and, despite official hostility to religion, frequented the few churches that remained open.

After completing compulsory military service he entered monastic life, receiving the name Gabriel. He was ordained a priest and later raised to the rank of archimandrite. Living as a fool-for-Christ, he adopted deliberately eccentric and sometimes shocking behaviour in order both to conceal his spiritual gifts and to preach the Gospel in a society that punished public profession of Christianity. In 1965, during a public May Day demonstration, he set fire to a large portrait of Lenin and declared that God alone should be worshipped. Soviet authorities arrested him, declared him insane, and confined him to a psychiatric hospital, where he was subjected to electric-shock treatment and other punitive measures. After his release he continued a life of extreme poverty and asceticism, restoring ruined churches with his own hands, sleeping in makeshift shelters, and wearing heavy chains.

In his later decades Archimandrite Gabriel settled at the Samtavro Monastery near Mtskheta, the ancient ecclesiastical centre of Georgia, where he served as spiritual father to the nuns and to a steadily growing stream of visitors. People of every social background—former Communist officials, intellectuals, villagers, and the sick—came to him for confession, counsel, and healing. He was widely credited with gifts of clairvoyance and wonder-working, yet he constantly directed attention away from himself toward repentance, humility, and love of neighbour. He lived through the collapse of Soviet power and the subsequent civil strife in Georgia, offering consolation and calling his countrymen back to the Church. He reposed on 2 November 1995.

After his death his grave at Samtavro immediately became a place of pilgrimage, and numerous healings and other miracles were reported. In December 2012 the Holy Synod of the Georgian Orthodox Church glorified him as Saint Gabriel, Confessor and Fool-for-Christ. His relics were found incorrupt and now rest in the monastery church, drawing Orthodox faithful from Georgia and far beyond. He is remembered as a striking witness to holiness under twentieth-century totalitarian persecution and as a teacher of uncompromising love and repentance.