Patriarch Alexy commemorates Metropolitan Nikolay (Yarushevich)

His Holiness Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia honoured the memory of Metropolitan Nikolay (Yarushevich) of Krutitsy and Kolomna by saying the office for the dead at his grave in the crypt of the Church of Our Lady of Smolensk at St. Sergius’s Monastery of the Holy Trinity, on December 13.

Addressing those who came to commemorate Metropolitan Nikolay, His Holiness said: ‘In 1922 the Lord called him to the episcopal ministry. He began his archpastoral service in the hard years of persecution and ended his life as a confessor of faith who was deprived of what is held most dear by any priest – the opportunity to celebrate divine services’. The patriarch noted that ‘people remember His Eminence Nikolay as an outstanding preacher and confessor of faith’.