Saint John of Kronstadt (in the world Ivan Ilyich Sergiev, 1829–1908) was a Russian Orthodox priest, preacher, public figure, and spiritual writer, rector of St. Andrew's Cathedral in Kronstadt. He was canonized in 1990.
John was born into the poor family of a psalm-reader in the village of Sura, in Arkhangelsk province, and passed through the Arkhangelsk seminary and the St. Petersburg Theological Academy. As a young man he felt certain he would become a missionary in China or North America — until one night he saw St. Andrew's Cathedral in Kronstadt in a dream and understood that his mission lay here, among Russian workers, sailors, and beggars.
Ordained in 1855, John served in that same cathedral for the whole of his remaining life — fifty-three years. Kronstadt was then a port town with vast slums, home to exiled workers, former convicts, drunkards, prostitutes. Father John walked into those slums every day — not as an inspector but as a brother, giving away money, clothes, shoes, often coming home barefoot, having handed his own boots to a beggar. His wife grumbled at this; he would answer, "The Lord will provide."
Gradually, wonders began to gather around him. Father John prayed for the sick — and the sick recovered. At first this was spoken of only in Kronstadt, then across the whole north, then throughout Russia. By the 1890s he was the most famous priest in the country. Thousands came to him from everywhere, peasants and grand dukes alike. He answered every letter, worked healings, gave money away: hundreds of thousands of rubles in donations passed through his hands each year, and all of it went to the poor, to hospitals, to schools. For himself he kept almost nothing.
His chief book, My Life in Christ (1893), is a spiritual diary — a record of prayer, of thoughts, of counsel. It is among the most widely read Orthodox books of the twentieth century. There is no system in it, no formal theology — only the living breath of a man who stands before God every day.
Father John was a fierce opponent of Leo Tolstoy, arguing sharply against his doctrine of "non-resistance" and his rejection of the Church. He was politically engaged as well: he sympathized with the right and supported the monarchy — a part of his biography that posterity judges in different ways.
He died on December 20, 1908, in Kronstadt; in his last hours, it is said, he kept repeating, "How good it is there." After 1917 his veneration was banned, and later revived — and today his grave in St. John's Convent on the Karpovka in St. Petersburg is one of the chief places of Russian devotion.