Constantine Bogoslovsky

Holy Hieromartyr Constantine Bogoslovsky was a mitred archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church, born on 17 February 1871 in the village of Borisovo, Gryazovets district, Vologda governorate, and shot on 2 October 1937 at Vologda. He was glorified among the saints in the year 2000. He is commemorated on 19 September; the source says by the new calendar, but 19 September by the old calendar is 2 October by the new, the day of his death, and this is the date that fits.

He was born into the family of a priest. He graduated from the theological school of Vologda (1885), the Vologda seminary (1891) and the Kazan Theological Academy with the degree of candidate of theology (1895). He taught the Law of God and Russian at the Vologda diocesan school for girls (1895 to 1896 and 1903 to 1907), Russian and Church Slavonic, penmanship and arithmetic at the Ust-⁠Sysolsk theological school (1896), and the history and refutation of the Russian schism and of local sects at the Vologda seminary (1899). He was a member of the Vologda committee of the Orthodox Missionary Society and secretary of the council of the Vologda Orthodox Brotherhood of the Most Merciful Saviour (1900). He was ordained priest and was superintendent of the Ustyug theological school (1907), member (1907) and chairman (1912) of the council of the Orthodox Brotherhood of Stephen and Procopius of Veliky Ustyug, chairman of the committee for the management of the repository of antiquities (1909) and of the council of the Ustyug diocesan school for girls (1910 to 1912), censor of sermons for the city of Veliky Ustyug (1914) and vice-⁠chairman of the diocesan committee for aid to refugees (1915). He received the hip-⁠cloth (1907), the skufia (1909), the kamilavka (1911), the pectoral cross (1914) and the orders of Saint Stanislaus third class (1902) and Saint Anne third class (1907). His wife was named Anamaisa Ivanovna, and his children Lyubov, Nikolai and Alexander.

In 1917 he was a delegate to the All-⁠Russian Congress of Clergy and Laity and honorary chairman of the congress of clergy and laity of the Veliky Ustyug vicariate; he was a member of the Local Council by election as a cleric of the Vologda diocese, took part in the first and third sessions and sat on the third and thirteenth sections. From 1918 he was archpriest, vice-⁠chairman of the extraordinary diocesan assembly of clergy and laity, chairman of the commission for making the Veliky Ustyug vicariate an independent diocese and of the Veliky Ustyug diocesan council, and rector of the Dormition cathedral. From 1920 he was archivist at the Northern Dvina governorate archive. In 1921, for organising the collection called the Church Mite, he was sentenced to 5 years in prison, but was released by amnesty. In 1923, for systematic anti-⁠Soviet agitation (that is, opposition to the Renovationists), he was sentenced to 2 years in the special camp at Solovki.

From 1925 he was rector of the church of the Annunciation and, from 1930, of the cemetery church of the Nativity of the Mother of God at Vologda, and chairman of the Vologda diocesan council. He received the mitre, collected information about closed churches and persecuted priests and initiated a complaint to the Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR against the illegal closure of the Bogorodsk cemetery. In 1937 he was arrested as head of a counter-⁠revolutionary church-⁠monarchist group, did not admit guilt and was shot. He was glorified as a hieromartyr in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000, for veneration throughout the Church. He also left writings: a diary, the work The State Position of the Roman Catholic Church from Catherine the Great to the Present (Kharkov, 1898) and a speech to the congress of graduates of the Vologda seminary.