Sergius Pravdolyubov

Holy Confessor Sergius Pravdolyubov, archpriest of Kasimov, confessed the faith through arrests and a labour camp and fell asleep in peace in 1950.

Family and ordination He was born in 1890 in the village of Makkaveevo in Ryazan province, in the family of Anatoly Pravdolyubov, a teacher at the Kasimov ecclesiastical school and later archpriest of the Dormition church in the town, a hieromartyr. The Pravdolyubov family had been a priestly line since the middle of the seventeenth century. He graduated from the Ryazan Seminary and the Kiev Theological Academy, married, and in 1915 was ordained priest at the church of the Saviour in the settlement of Kukarka in Vyatka province. From 1919 he was rector of the Trinity cathedral in Kukarka.

Dangers That year he was twice spared from death. A punitive detachment of Latvian riflemen swept through the town at night, arresting and shooting the best-⁠known men. At the cathedral they woke the watchman and demanded to be shown the house of the "chief priest". The watchman did not point to the house of Father Sergius, the dean and rector, but to that of the former rector, who was old and retired but whom he out of long habit counted the "chief priest". The old man was brought out of his house and shot on the spot. Father Sergius remembered this all his life and always prayed for the priest shot in his place. Also then, all the priests of the town, he among them, were arrested, taken into the forest and made to dig a great ditch beside a railway line; they were sure they were digging their own grave, and they wept and prayed. A freight train arrived, and the commander shouted that, being used to the stench of the dead, the priests would unload and bury four wagons of rotten fish. While he dug, thinking he was digging his own grave, his infant son Vladimir died.

Arrests and the camp In 1923 he moved with his wife and five children to Kasimov as rector of the Trinity church. In 1929 he was arrested with many priests of the town and district and sentenced to two years in prison, but his parishioners kept pleading for the release of their pastor, and by Easter 1930 he was freed. In 1935 he was arrested again, with his brother, Father Nicholas Pravdolyubov, and his son Anatoly, in the so-⁠called Case of Matrona Anemnyasevskaya. He received five years and was sent with his son to the Solovki special camp, and two years later to Medvezhyegorsklag in Karelia.

The last years He came out of the camp in 1943 and returned to Kasimov, but the Trinity church was closed and there was no place to serve; the family lived on occasional services and temporary replacements. His wife, Lydia Dmitrievna, worked to feed them. In December 1943 he was mobilized to the labour front in the quarries at Maleevo in the Ryazan region, where for three years he was a watchman. His health was broken, and in 1944 he wrote a spiritual testament addressed to his children and grandchildren, on how to keep the fasts and prepare for confession and communion. In 1946 he was named rector of the church of the Saviour in Spassk, in the Ryazan region; the next year his son Anatoly was ordained deacon and then priest for the same church, and Father Sergius moved to Lebedyan and served in the church there to the end of his life. He fell asleep in 1950, aged sixty, and was buried in Kasimov, in the Trinity church.

He is commemorated, in the new style, on 18 December, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, on 23 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Ryazan, on 23 August in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Solovki, on 23 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Lipetsk, and on 21 October in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vyatka.