Catherine Malkov-⁠Panina

Holy Blessed Catherine Malkov-⁠Panina, a nun, a fool for Christ, was born on 15 May 1889 in Finland, in the fortress of Sveaborg, in the family of the military engineer Vasily Vasilievich Malkov-⁠Panin. The family had six children. From her early years she was distinguished by kindness and compassion and liked to visit a monastery not far from their estate. She reposed on 5 May 1968, in Estonia. She was numbered among the saints by decision of the Holy Synod on 7 March 2018, for local veneration at the Pühtitsa Monastery.

Until 1900 the family lived in Helsingfors, then moved to Gatchina. At the beginning of the twentieth century Catherine studied at the natural science faculty of the Bestuzhev courses and, after graduating, in 1912-1913 worked at the Entomological Society. In 1914 she enrolled in the nursing courses and worked at the same time in free city hospitals, then in a hospital behind the front, then in the flying detachment of the Community of Saint George, whose sisters helped wounded soldiers carried from the battlefield.

After a severe illness she took work as a labourer in the village of Bezzabotnoe near Petersburg, and in 1919 came with her parents to Estonia. On 5 July 1922 she was received among the novices of the Pühtitsa Monastery. From her first days in the monastery she behaved at times strangely, as a fool for Christ, and soon was moved to the Gethsemane Skete, thirty kilometres from the monastery.

At the beginning of the war the skete was closed and its sisters returned to the monastery. In 1942 Catherine was released to go home to care for her elderly, sick parents, who lived in Tallinn. In the same year she buried her mother and stayed with her father. In Tallinn she visited the Pühtitsa metochion and foretold, almost twenty years in advance, its closing. In 1947 she buried her father and returned to the monastery, where she began openly to live as a fool for Christ.

The nuns recalled that she sometimes took on a special fast, saying that she was preparing to die, and usually this came before the death of one of the sisters. If she said she was fasting because she was preparing for tonsure into the mantle, it meant that someone was to be tonsured. Catherine was honoured by the Orthodox people as having the gift of foresight and healing, and many pilgrims came to her for counsel and prayer. In April 1966 Archbishop Alexis of Tallinn and Estonia tonsured her into the mantle, privately, in the abbess's quarters, keeping her former name.

In her last years she rarely left the house and lay down most of the time. When she rose and appeared unexpectedly somewhere, it was a great event and meant that something important was to happen in that house. According to the nuns, Mother Catherine was constantly ill but showed nothing of her suffering outwardly. In one of her last letters she wrote: How easy it is to take up an ascetic labour and how hard to finish it.

She passed peacefully to the Lord on 5 May 1968, on the feast of the Myrrhbearing Women. Many testimonies have been preserved of the holiness of the ascetic and of her gifts, among them healings, some confirmed by medical documents.

She is commemorated on 5 May and, on 1 December, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Estonia.