A few days ago in Munich, the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia received the report of Bishop James of Sonora, who chairs the commission studying the life and veneration of the late Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose). The Council resolved to recognize the righteousness of his path and to bless the further preparatory work toward his eventual glorification among the venerable fathers. This is not yet the act of canonization itself; it is the formal opening of the road that leads there. That distinction matters: the Church is still in a position to deliberate. The more searching question, then, is not whether Father Seraphim was a holy man, but what the Church will actually be canonizing if it canonizes him here, now, in this configuration of forces.
The Politics of Saints
Let me say plainly what I think the trajectory the Synod has now opened actually is: it is, quite obviously, a political canonization in the making. By “political” I do not mean cynical, nor do I question the personal piety of the bishops who voted. Almost every glorification in Orthodox history has had a political dimension; the act of recognition is itself an exercise of authority. What makes this canonization political in a stronger sense is that it answers a very specific demand currently shaping American Orthodoxy.
That demand is for ideological Orthodoxy: a package of ready answers, firm boundaries, recognizable enemies, and unambiguous identity markers. In this register, Orthodoxy ceases to function primarily as a way of life in Christ and begins to function as a worldview system—a comprehensive explanation of modernity and its discontents, a position from which to fight the culture wars. The contemporary American religious landscape generates this demand at scale, and ROCOR is now in a position to claim it. A new cult, once installed, will quickly begin to generate symbolic and reputational capital, and quite possibly financial capital as well, through publications, pilgrimages, iconography, conferences, and the entire traditionalist niche economy.
This is where the trouble begins. A canonization is not only a recognition of holiness; it is also the issuance of a banner—and banners, once raised, are seized by whoever has the strongest hands.
What the Banner Will Authorize
Consider a comment I received recently on my Substack from a thoughtful reader, defending the glorification. He praised Father Seraphim’s “warm and humble heart, his love for his spiritual children, his rejection of modernity as an ideological canon to which we must adhere, his pursuit of inward peace, his love for Christ.” Read that sentence again. Is it not telling that the rejection of modernity is named before the love for Christ? For me this is a red flag—precisely the kind of culture-war marker that gives me pause: the rejection of “modernity” comes first, as the primary identity badge, and only then Christ and His love.
I recognize, of course, that the Church has always venerated “problematic” saints—those whose lives illumine while their teachings unsettle, or whose teachings stand while their lives wound. God works through our failures, and the sensus fidelium has often shown a remarkable capacity to receive what is genuine in a saint and let the rest fall away over time. My concern is not that Father Seraphim was a flawed man, nor that his theological writings contain passages that are tendentious, polemical, or apocalyptically overheated. My concern is what his cult will become in this particular historical setting.
A Russian Parallel
I write this with a specific Russian parallel in mind. I was personally involved in the question of the recognition of the remains of Tsar Nicholas II and his family—I traveled many times to Ekaterinburg and to Porosenkov Log, where the remains were found, and reported directly to Patriarch Alexy II. I have deep respect for the personal tragedy of the royal family. The glorification of the Royal Martyrs in 2000, taken on its own terms, was an act of pastoral attention to suffering borne in faith.
But the cult that grew up around it did not remain a story of the suffering Tsar, his wife and their children. It was gradually absorbed into the myth of a “holy emperor of the Christian Empire,” and that myth has fed Russian Christian nationalism for more than two decades—structurally, not always consciously. It has supplied the theological vocabulary for imperial nostalgia, for “Holy Rus’ against the godless West,” and ultimately for the present war in Ukraine and the persecution of those Russian Orthodox Christians who refused to bless that war. None of this was the intention of those who venerated Tsar Nicholas as a passion-bearer. But intentions are not what determine the social and political afterlife of a saint after canonization.
This is the lesson I would press upon the path the Synod has now opened. If even a small ideological component is mixed into the veneration of a saint, that ideological component will be foregrounded—because it is precisely what an organized constituency needs the saint for. A canonized Father Seraphim will, almost inevitably, be invoked in the American context to authorize a particular package: anti-ecumenism, culture-war battle, conspiracy-tinged apocalypticism. Whatever Father Seraphim was personally, his image will be weaponized.
What the Church Owes Itself
The deeper tragedy is that there is currently very little in American Orthodoxy strong enough to counterbalance this. Father Seraphim himself loved Russian theology of the nineteenth century, above all the writings of Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov) and similar ilk. He was also prepared, in print, to deny certain twentieth-century theologians the right to be called Orthodox at all. The new cult will inherit that map of authorities and that habit of judgment. Yet the very theology Father Seraphim treated with such suspicion—the inheritance of “The Paris School,” Florovsky, Schmemann, Meyendorff, Yannaras, Zizioulas—is precisely what would be needed now as a counterweight. However, this theology lives mostly in academic seminars and adjacent milieu. For the broader Orthodox public, the loudest and most visible option is the ideological roster the new cult will reinforce.
The Church owes itself a measure of theological self-awareness about the saints it raises up. Precisely because God works through our failures, we are responsible at least to name and resist the instrumentalization of sanctity—in Russia, and now in America as well.