Innocent of Alaska

The act by which the Russian Orthodox Church declared him a saint gives the outline of his life; its nineteenth-century dates are those of the Julian calendar then used in Russia. He was born John Popov-Veniaminov on 26 August 1797 in a village of Irkutsk province (Russian Orthodox Church, Act on the canonization of Innocent (1977), para. beginning ‘Saint Innocent (secular name’). As a married priest he reached Unalaska on 29 July 1824, learned the local dialects, devised an alphabet for Aleut and translated the Gospel of Matthew (Russian Orthodox Church, Act on the canonization of Innocent (1977), paras. beginning ‘On May 7, 1823’ and ‘His travels over the islands’). After his wife’s death he took monastic vows on 29 November 1840 with the name Innocent, and on 15 December was consecrated bishop of Kamchatka, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands, with his see at Sitka (Russian Orthodox Church, Act on the canonization of Innocent (1977), paras. beginning ‘On November 29, 1840’ and ‘At the same time, the Holy Synod’). He was appointed metropolitan of Moscow on 5 January 1868 (Russian Orthodox Church, Act on the canonization of Innocent (1977), para. beginning ‘On November 19, 1867’) and died on 31 March 1879 (Russian Orthodox Church, Act on the canonization of Innocent (1977), para. beginning ‘Feeling that his end was approaching’). He was numbered among the saints on 6 October 1977, at the request of the Orthodox Church in America (Russian Orthodox Church, Act on the canonization of Innocent (1977), para. beginning ‘On October 6, 1977’).

His Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven teaches that the one way is the way Christ himself walked (Veniaminov, Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven, introduction). In a letter of 1867 he tells how he invoked Herman of Alaska at sea off Spruce Island in 1842 (Valaam Monastery, History of the Kodiak Mission (1894), pp. 169–170 (letter of Archbishop Innocent, 1 March 1867)). See Orthodox Monks Reach Alaska.