Sergius Mechev

Saint Sergius Mechev, the Hieromartyr (1892 to 1942), was an archpriest in Moscow, son of Saint Alexei Mechev the Righteous and his successor as head of the community at the church of Saint Nicholas on Maroseika. Arrested and exiled in the years of persecution, he afterwards lived in secret, serving the Liturgy daily. He was shot at Yaroslavl on 6 January 1942. The Russian Church canonized him in 2000, together with his father.

Family and training

Sergius Alekseevich Mechev was born on 17 (30) September 1892 in Moscow, the fourth child of Archpriest Alexei Mechev, from 1893 rector of the church of Saint Nicholas in Klenniki. His mother, Anna Petrovna, died in 1902. He graduated with a silver medal from the Third Moscow Gymnasium (1910) and began medicine at the university, but then graduated from the faculty of history and philology. He studied ancient Russian literature under Academician Mikhail Speransky, who called him one of his best students. In 1913 he visited Italy and Switzerland and became acquainted with classical models of Western art. He knew Russian icons well. Already at university he was interested in the problems of spiritual guidance, its history and practice.

In 1914 to 1916 he served as a volunteer orderly and brother of mercy in the front zone, at the Second Mobile Field Hospital of the Red Cross. There he met his future wife, Evfrosinia Nikolaevna Shaforostova (1890 to 1959), from a merchant family, who had taken the higher courses for women and worked as a nurse. In 1917 he was briefly a volunteer at the front. In 1918 he took part in the delegation of the Higher Church Administration that defended the rights of the Church before the government, and then he met Patriarch Tikhon. He worked briefly at the People's Commissariat of Education.

Priest at Maroseika

In the spring of 1919 he was ordained deacon, and on 17 April that year priest, by Bishop Theodore (Pozdeevsky). From 1919 to 1929 he served at the church of Saint Nicholas in Klenniki, on Maroseika, holding religious talks with his father in the church and in the homes of the faithful. He was a fiery preacher and knew the works of the Holy Fathers well. In 1923, after his father's death, he became rector and head of the Maroseika community, which included many people of the humanities, with the blessing of the Optina elder Nectarius. In that year he was briefly in prison because he did not recognize the Renovationist movement.

Under him the movement of spiritual families developed in the community: groups of members who met often, read patristic writings together and prayed. Members of these families helped one another in the time of persecution. The faithful loved him greatly. One of them left testimony that the service served by Father Sergius was extraordinary: his voice sang, and in the singing his soul poured itself out before God; the choir followed him in fervent prayer, the souls of those praying joined the choir, and the common prayer rose to heaven like a pillar of light. He introduced the start of the morning service at six o'clock, so that people could go to the service and then to work. His closest associates were Boris Kholchev, deacon and then priest at the same church, and Sergei Nikitin, chairman of the parish council, in the 1930s a secret priest and from 1960 Bishop Stephen.

Persecution

In 1927 he refused to support the "Declaration" of Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), which called for full loyalty to the Soviet power, and joined those who did not commemorate. On 29 October 1929 he was arrested together with two other priests and several parishioners from Maroseika. He was accused of forming an anti-⁠Soviet group and exiled to the Northern Region, where he stayed at Arkhangelsk and Kadnikov. In exile he kept up correspondence and met spiritual children who came to him. On 13 December 1931, by a decree of the Synod, the whole clergy and the whole parish of the church of Saint Nicholas were "excommunicated from the Orthodox Church and forbidden to serve" because they had refused to carry out the patriarchate's decree of 1927 on commemoration of the authorities at the service.

In 1932 his wife was arrested and received three years of exile with "minus 12", that is, a ban on living in twelve big cities. She was to serve it in the Urals but, through the efforts of Father Sergius's spiritual children, obtained through the Red Cross permission to live in Kadnikov. The guardian of the four Mechev children became her brother, Gleb Nikolaevich Shaforostov. On 7 March 1933 Sergius Mechev was arrested in exile, accused of anti-⁠Soviet agitation, and held in the Vologda prison. On 1 July he was sentenced to five years in a camp, where he worked mostly unloading timber at a sawmill and, briefly, as a medical assistant.

Hidden life and death

In the summer of 1937 he was released for "shock labour". He lived illegally at Skhodnya station near Moscow, then worked at a clinic in the town of Kalinin (now Tver) and lived not far from the town. He kept contact with his spiritual children and in 1938 invited Bishop Manuil (Lemeshevsky) to ordain several of them priests in secret. According to the investigation documents, in 1939 Bishop Manuil, after his arrest, gave testimony naming members of the community, which led to the arrest of the priests he had ordained and to a severe blow to Father Sergius's community. Admirers of Metropolitan Manuil consider these data unreliable, but they have remained an obstacle to that hierarch's canonization.

Father Sergius had to leave the Kalinin region and continued a "catacomb" ministry. In early 1940 he moved to Rybinsk, where he worked as a medical assistant at a clinic, then lived in the village of Mishaki, near Tutaev. He served the Liturgy in secret every day. He was advised to flee to Central Asia but refused, so as not to abandon his spiritual children. After the war began, on 7 July 1941, he was arrested and imprisoned at Yaroslavl. He was accused of "carrying out work to create underground so-⁠called 'catacomb churches', planting secret monasticism after the type of Jesuit orders and on this basis organizing anti-⁠Soviet elements for active struggle against the Soviet power". The military tribunal of the NKVD troops of the Yaroslavl region sentenced him to death on 22 November 1941. He was shot on 6 January 1942 (24 December 1941 by the old calendar) and buried in an unknown common grave.

His children and veneration

Four children remained. Irina (1920 to 2006) was a doctor and worked forty years at a tuberculosis institute. Alexei (1921 to 1988) was a prisoner of war and was then sentenced to ten years in a camp, and later worked as an engineer, a specialist in the design of fire engines. Elizaveta (1923 to 1996) took medical courses and wrote memoirs, and Anna (1925 to 2004) had three children.

In August 2000 the Jubilee Bishops' Council of the Russian Church numbered him among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. His father, Archpriest Alexei Mechev, was canonized then as well. They are venerated together in the church of Saint Nicholas in Klenniki, where there is a side chapel dedicated to Saint Alexei the Righteous and the Hieromartyr Sergius Mechev. Saint Sergius is commemorated on 24 December (6 January by the new calendar), and together with his father on 22 June (9 July).