Q4202726

Hilarion (secular name Vladimir Alekseyevich Troitsky) was born in 1886 in the village of Lipitsy in Kashira uezd, Tula Governorate, into the family of a parish priest. He received a classical clerical education at the Tula theological school and seminary, then entered the Moscow Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1910. Already as a student he showed unusual gifts as a patristic scholar and preacher. His principal academic work, a study of the history of the dogma of the Church, argued from the Fathers that the Church is not a mere religious society but the Body of Christ; the dissertation established his reputation and was later counted among the important Russian Orthodox ecclesiological texts of the early twentieth century. He remained at the academy as a teacher of New Testament and related subjects.

In 1913 he was tonsured a monk with the name Hilarion and ordained to the priesthood, soon being raised to archimandrite and appointed inspector of the Moscow Theological Academy. He took part in the All-Russian Local Council of 1917–1918, where, though still young, he spoke in favor of restoring the patriarchate. After the council he became a close collaborator of Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow. In 1920 he was consecrated Bishop of Vereya, a vicar of the Moscow diocese. During the early Soviet years he was among the most visible opponents of the Renovationist (Living Church) schism: his sermons in Moscow churches, especially after Patriarch Tikhon’s release in 1923, drew large crowds and helped recover parishes from the schismatics. He was arrested more than once in this period.

From late 1923 he was imprisoned in the Solovki camp, where a number of bishops and theologians were concentrated. There he belonged to the circle of confined hierarchs who tried to keep canonical order and pastoral care alive under camp conditions. After Solovki he passed through exile and further detention, including confinement in Yaroslavl. He did not accept Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky)’s 1927 declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state. In 1929 he was sentenced to exile in Kazakhstan. While being transported he contracted typhus, was taken off the train in Leningrad, and died in a prison hospital on 28 December 1929, at the age of forty-three. He was first buried in Leningrad; in 1999 his relics were uncovered and transferred to the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow, where they remain.

The Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a hieromartyr, first for local veneration in the Moscow diocese in 1999 and then church-wide with the New Martyrs and Confessors at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of 2000 under Patriarch Alexy II. He is commemorated on the date of his death and with the synaxes of the New Martyrs, of the Moscow saints, and of the Solovki saints. His surviving sermons and theological essays continue to be read for their patristic ecclesiology and for the witness of a scholar-bishop who died in the camps.