St. Justin Popović

He was born in 1894 in Vranje in southern Serbia, the son of a priest, into a family that had given priests to the Church for generations. Baptized Blagoje, he studied at the seminary in Belgrade, served as a nurse amid the horrors of the First World War, and during those years was tonsured a monk with the name Justin.

He pursued theological studies abroad, in Russia, England, and Greece, and took his doctorate at Athens with a thesis on the spiritual world of Dostoevsky. Returning home, he taught in the seminaries and was in time made professor of dogmatic theology in the University of Belgrade, where his lectures drew the devotion of his students and the suspicion of the worldly.

When the communists seized power after the Second World War, Father Justin was expelled from the university and silenced. He withdrew to the convent of Ćelije near Valjevo, where he served as spiritual father to the nuns and lived, watched and harassed by the regime, for more than thirty years — laboring at his writing, receiving the many who sought his counsel, and celebrating the divine services with burning fervor.

From Ćelije came the great body of his work: a three-volume Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church, the monumental Lives of the Saints gathered for the whole year, his philosophical writings on man and the God-Man, and his searching critique of the spirit of the age. At the heart of all of it stands the Person of Christ, the God-Man, in whom alone, he taught, man finds the measure and the healing of his humanity.

Around him gathered the disciples who would become a renewal of the Serbian Church in the next generation, among them the bishops Athanasius, Amphilochius, and Irenaeus. He reposed at Ćelije on the seventh of April, 1979 — by tradition the very feast of the Annunciation, the day of his birth. In 2010 the Serbian Orthodox Church glorified him as Saint Justin the New, of Ćelije.