Jonah of Moscow

Saint Jonah, metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus from 1448 to 1461, was chosen by a council of Russian bishops after the condemnation of Isidore, who had accepted the Union of Florence. He was the last metropolitan to lead the united Russian Church and the last named metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus with his seat at Moscow. He fell asleep on 31 March 1461.

He was born in the 1390s, in the village of Odnoushevo near Soligalich, in the family of a landowner, Feodor Odnoush. At twelve he took the monastic habit in a monastery near Galich, and after some years moved to the Simonov monastery in Moscow, where he worked as a baker. Tradition says that once, tired from work, he fell asleep in the bakery; Metropolitan Photius, passing by, saw him and prophesied that the young man would be a great hierarch of the Russian land. Photius consecrated him bishop of Ryazan and Murom. After Photius's death, in 1431, a council of Russian bishops chose him as successor; in 1432 he was called metropolitan elect. The struggles over the grand princely throne kept him from going to Constantinople; Svitrigaila sent there Gerasim of Smolensk, who was consecrated but was killed in 1435. When Jonah reached Constantinople, in 1436, the patriarch had already made the Greek Isidore metropolitan. Isidore came to Moscow in 1437 but soon left for the Council of Florence, where he accepted union with Rome. Returning to Moscow in 1441, he was condemned by a council of Russian bishops, imprisoned, and managed to flee to Rome. The see stayed vacant seven years.

On 15 December 1448 a council of Russian bishops, at the request of Grand Prince Vasily II, chose Jonah metropolitan, without the approval of the patriarch of Constantinople. Not all the clergy supported the election, but after the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, the step was held justified; it came to be seen as the beginning of the autocephaly of the Russian Church. In his letter to the Russian clergy Jonah proved his election lawful, and to Byzantium he sent a letter showing that he had not done it from pride, but because of the difficulty and distance of the road, the disturbances and the division in the Church. His first aim was to recover the lands lost to the Uniates; he managed to add Lithuania and Kiev to his title, but not Galicia. From 1451 he cleared the regions of Isidore's influence, but in 1458 Lithuania was separated from his jurisdiction, and two metropolias formed, that of Kiev and Lithuania and that of Moscow, which reunited only at the end of the seventeenth century. In 1459 he held a synod at Moscow that established Moscow's autocephaly. He glorified Metropolitan Alexis and was a great wonderworker and spiritual father.

He was canonised at the Makaryev council of 1547. His feast is on 31 March, 27 May (translation of relics), 15 June and 5 October (Synaxis of the Hierarchs of Moscow).