St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco

He was born Michael Maximovitch in 1896 in the Kharkov province of Russia, of a noble family, a frail and sickly child of deep piety. After the revolution his family fled abroad, and he completed his studies in the kingdom of Serbia, where he was tonsured a monk with the name John and ordained. In 1934 he was consecrated bishop and sent to Shanghai.

In Shanghai he showed at once the measure of his life. He kept the whole cycle of services daily, never slept lying down but only in snatches in a chair or at prayer, went barefoot, and gave away whatever he had. He gathered the orphaned and abandoned children of the city into a home placed under the protection of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, going out himself into the worst quarters to find them.

When the communists came to power in China, he led his people out, first to a camp on the island of Tubabao in the Philippines, where the tradition recounts that he walked the camp blessing it against the typhoons that spared it. He labored without ceasing to resettle his flock, traveling even to Washington to plead their cause, and was then sent to Western Europe and at last to San Francisco.

Everywhere he was followed by accounts of healing and of foreknowledge, and by the love of the poor and the mockery of the comfortable, for he kept the appearance of a fool for Christ. He honored the ancient saints of the West from before the schism and labored to restore their memory. In San Francisco he bore the sorrow of division in his flock with patience, falsely accused and vindicated.

He reposed on the second of July, 1966, in Seattle, while visiting with the wonderworking Kursk Root Icon of the Mother of God, having foretold the nearness of his death. His body was found incorrupt, and he was glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in 1994. His relics rest in the cathedral in San Francisco, and the Church keeps his memory on the second of July.