Constantine (Essensky)

Bishop Constantine (Essensky) of Richmond was a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, a vicar bishop in Australia, an iconographer and a spiritual father. He is venerated by the faithful without synodal canonization.

He was born in 1907 in Saint Petersburg, with the name Emmanuel, and his family moved to Riga in Latvia in the first year of the revolution. His father, who had worked in the Imperial Chancery, was arrested and killed by the Bolsheviks, and his mother died of grief, leaving him an orphan. He finished school, studied iconography with an Old Rite icon painter, entered the seminary in Riga in 1928 and went to Paris, where he took a doctorate at the Saint Sergius Theological Institute. He was ordained a priest by Metropolitan Eulogius and served in Germany, at Berlin, Leipzig and other places; in 1938 he moved to the Church Abroad. He began medical studies in Berlin. In 1949 he reached the United States and served as rector of the Church of the Ascension at Glen Cove, New York, which he beautified with his iconography.

In October 1967 he was tonsured a monk with the name Constantine by Archbishop Averky at Jordanville, and two months later he was consecrated bishop, vicar of Brisbane in Australia (1967 to 1976). In 1978 he was vicar bishop in Boston and New York, then bishop of Richmond and Great Britain (1981 to 1985), when he retired because of poor health. From 1991 he lived at the Christ of the Hills Monastery in Blanco, Texas, and reposed there on 31 May 1996. His remains, moved to Jordanville on 1 December 2014, were found incorrupt.