Joseph Muñoz-⁠Cortes

Joseph Muñoz-⁠Cortés (Brother Joseph, in monasticism Ambrose) was an Orthodox icon painter and monk of Chilean origin, for fifteen years keeper of the myrrh-⁠streaming Montreal Iveron icon of the Mother of God, who was murdered in Athens in 1997. Born on 13 May 1948 in Chile, he died in the night of 31 October 1997. According to a Russian report, the part of the Russian Church Outside Russia that did not accept union with the Moscow Patriarchate glorified him in 2024 as a new martyr. His commemoration is tied to that glorification.

Childhood and conversion

Born at Valparaíso or Santiago in Chile, into a poor and pious Catholic family of Spanish origin, his father, José del Tránsito Muñoz Johnson, was a sailor and died young, of diabetes. His mother, Maria Clementina del Carmen Cortés Fernández, had ancestors among the high Catholic clergy; his grandmother was English, and his mother a gifted painter. From childhood he showed compassion toward people and zeal for painting. In 1962, at twelve, on his way to the Catholic church, he heard from an open door a wonderful singing from the Orthodox church of the Holy Trinity (of the Russian Church Outside Russia) in Santiago; the beauty of the service drew him, and he began to go there. After two years Archbishop Leontius of Chile received him into Orthodoxy, with his mother's consent, who, visiting the church and meeting the archbishop's poverty and kindness, told him not to return to the Catholic Church. He studied art and was a teacher for eight years. After Bishop Leontius's death he answered the call of Metropolitan Vitaly and came to Montreal, attended an Orthodox college for three years, learned icon painting from Nikolai Shelikhov, lived at the metochion of the brotherhood of Venerable Job of Pochaev and taught art history at the university, where he defended a thesis on the Apostle Paul. In the early 1980s he fell gravely ill.

The icon

In 1982 he visited Athos, among other places the Nativity of the Saviour skete, of the Old Calendar Synod of the Church of Greece, where he was struck by an Iveron icon of the Mother of God painted by Hieromonk Chrysostom. He asked to buy it and was refused, but he prayed, and on his last day on Athos he received it as a gift from Schema-⁠Abbot Clement. The icon began to stream abundant myrrh and to give off fragrance on 24 November 1982, after his return to Canada: "In the night of 24 November, at three, I woke up from a strong fragrance... I saw that the whole icon was covered with fragrant myrrh." The myrrh flowed mostly from the hands of Christ and of the Mother of God and from the star on her right shoulder; the back of the icon always remained dry. The icon was placed in the cathedral of the Russian Church Outside Russia in Montreal, where many people came. For fifteen years Brother Joseph kept this holy icon and travelled with it to parishes in many countries: the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria and others. He carried the icon in a dark red velvet sash. He always remained humble and stood discreetly at the back of the church, like a monk. He was tonsured a monk on Athos by Schema-⁠Abbot Clement with the name Ambrose, after Venerable Ambrose of Optina. He lived in poverty and gave to the needy the money he was given. His friends founded the "House of the Icon", which became the "Brother Joseph Memorial Foundation".

It is told that a Miami newspaper wrote about the icon, and the mother of a young man who had broken his neck in a motorcycle accident asked that it be brought to Mercy Hospital; witnesses said that, with his coming into the intensive care unit, premature babies began to breathe without incubators, and the young man showed no sign of fracture. The cotton used to wipe the myrrh was kept and is said to smell of roses even after years.

Murder

From the beginning of October 1997 the icon stopped streaming myrrh and began to weep. Before his trip to Athos, Brother Joseph passed through France, uneasy, looking for someone to entrust the icon to for safekeeping. He reached Athens on 13 October, without the icon, to meet Abbot Chrysostom. In the night of 31 October 1997 he was killed in a room of the Grand Hotel in Athens, after being called by telephone, as if from a spiritual father from Athos. A man in the next room heard groans all night but told no one. In 1998 the expert physician said at the trial that he had been tightly bound across the bed, with marks of blows on the head and face, a brain haemorrhage, blood from the eyes, cheeks cut by rope, a crushed Adam's apple and signs of torture on legs, hands and chest. The apartment where he lived had been robbed right after the crime. A Romanian, Nicolae Ciaru, was accused and tried at Athens in November 1998 and acquitted for lack of evidence.

The icon disappeared without trace. According to some reports he had had a premonition of death and had the icon taken to a Greek monastery for safekeeping, where it is today; according to others it was taken by those who killed him. Some in the Russian Church Outside Russia, opposed to its absorption by the Moscow Patriarchate, said that the disappearance of the icon and the death of its keeper were connected with this "absorption". He was buried on 12 November 1997, as he wished, in the Russian cemetery of Holy Trinity monastery at Jordanville, New York. Witnesses say that on the body only the marks of torture were seen, without signs of decay and without smell. It is told that on the fortieth day after death, 9 December 1997, candles lit by themselves on the grave, burning for an unusually long time. In 2000, before her death, his mother, Maria Cortés, came to Montreal, received Orthodoxy and asked to be buried beside her son; after her death Metropolitan Laurus did not allow it.

Convictions and veneration

He considered that young people live a hard life, which makes them study to earn money, forgetting spiritual things, he regarded television as a calamity and a drug and refused a film about the icon. He said that children must be taught by example, and he honoured Saint John of Shanghai, who cared only for spiritual things. In November 2007, twenty-⁠five years after the appearance of the icon and ten after the murder of its keeper, a commemoration was held at Jordanville. On 14 December 2012, with the blessing of Metropolitan Hilarion, a diocesan commission for canonization was established, which gathered data on Metropolitan Philaret and on Brother Joseph. According to a Russian report, on 4 February 2024, in the church of the Kazan icon in Sydney, two bishops of the Russian Church Outside Russia who did not accept union with the Moscow Patriarchate glorified him as a new martyr, on the day of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.