Q4281886

Metropolitan Macarius (Nevsky), in the world Mikhail Andreyevich Nevsky, was a Russian Orthodox metropolitan, missionary, and saint. He was born in 1835 in the village of Shapkino in the Vladimir Governorate of the Russian Empire, the son of a church server. He received a clerical education in the theological schools of the region, including the Vladimir Theological Seminary. Rather than remaining in European Russia as a parish clergyman, he volunteered for the Altai Spiritual Mission in southern Siberia in the second half of the 1850s and spent most of his life on that remote frontier.

In the Altai he studied indigenous languages, helped translate Scripture and liturgical texts, established churches and schools, and worked for the conversion of local Turkic and other native peoples to Orthodox Christianity. He received monastic tonsure with the name Macarius and was ordained as a hieromonk, remaining a celibate monk for the rest of his life. His long service led to consecration as a bishop. He served as vicar bishop of Biysk and later as Bishop and Archbishop of Tomsk, becoming one of the Russian Church’s most experienced missionary hierarchs of the later nineteenth century.

In 1912 he was appointed Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna and a member of the Holy Governing Synod, occupying one of the highest sees of the imperial church in its final years. After the February Revolution of 1917 he was retired from the Moscow cathedra amid the political and ecclesiastical turmoil of that year. He withdrew to the Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastery in the Moscow region, where he lived during the early Soviet period, when the Orthodox Church came under severe pressure from the new regime.

He died in 1926. He was buried at the Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastery. In 2000 the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint, honoring him as a holy hierarch and enlightener of the Altai. His relics are venerated at the restored monastery. He is remembered as a leading representative of the nineteenth-century Russian missionary movement among the non-Slavic peoples of Siberia.