WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th June, 2021) One of the most venerated saints of the Russian diaspora, Archbishop John of Shanghai and San Francisco, spent the last day of his life in extraordinarily long prayers, his spiritual son and witness to his death Patrick Bredin told Sputnik.
The Russian Orthodox Church will commemorate the 55th anniversary of Archbishop John's blissful depart on July 2. He died on that day in 1966 in Seattle, Washington, where he was visiting the St. Nicholas Orthodox cathedral with the wonder-working Kursk Root icon of the Mother of God.
Patrick Bredin, who was born in Malaysia and became Russian Orthodox after meeting with Archbishop John in China in 1938, had come to Seattle from Vancouver, Canada, to accompany the archbishop and the Holy icon.
"The last weekend of St. John's life, my very close friend and I were in Seattle to bring the archbishop to Vancouver with the wonder-working icon," Bredin said. "During that last day, I remember, he was doing a lot of praying in the altar after the Divine Liturgy."
After the archbishop's death, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) leadership ruled immediately to transfer his body to his home city of San Francisco for the funeral.
"There were a lot of conversations and discussions about how to get his body back to San Francisco," Bredin said.
He described St. John as one of the people he was closest to, someone who paid more attention to him even than his own father.
"It is hard to express the feelings I had when he passed away. It was very sad to me. He was the closest father I had in my life," Bredin said.
Archbishop John, whose secular name Mikhail Maksimovitch, was born in 1896 in the Russian Empire. He left in 1921 after the Bolshevik revolution together with his family and settled in Yugoslavia as did many Russian emigres at the time. He graduated from Belgrade University with a degree in theology and was tonsured a monk. In 1934, he was ordained a bishop of the ROCOR and assigned to the diocese of Shanghai.�
Bredin came to Shanghai, where his father resided after his divorce, in 1938, as a 12-year-old boy. He was delivering milk in the city of Laoshan when he met St. John.
"The Archbishop asked me, would I like to be Orthodox? My step-mother was Russian, so I answered, yes, I do," Patrick recalled. "St. John told me: 'You can be baptized. Go this coming Sunday to the church in Laoshan.'"
Shortly thereafter, Patrick was baptized with the name of Andrew and, advised by Archbishop John, began studying in the Russian school.
"St. John took me under his wing. He absolutely loved all the children in our school. He taught me to become an altar boy," Bredin noted. "I even was able to come to his cabinet where he always worked and prayed. How can I ever forget that? Never in my life."
St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco was canonized by the ROCOR in 1994. His relics rest in the Cathedral of the Theotokos, Joy of All Who Sorrow in San Francisco.
Fourteen years later, in 2008, he was glorified by the Bishop's Council of the Russian Orthodox Church for all-church veneration.
