Sarov, the Los Alamos of the USSR

[Tis_Bearself]

I wasn’t quite sure where to put this topic because it’s about the Russian Orthodox St. Seraphim of Sarov, but settled on this category because it’s where @(name removed by moderator) made his previous threads on the Chernobyl Icon of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Anyway, Jan 2 is the old calendar feast day of the repose of St. Seraphim, who is a saint I like very much. I know he’s Orthodox and that he was not always approving of the Catholic Church, but St. Pope JPII called him a saint so I figure it is okay for me to like him. I was initially interested in him because while hermiting in the woods, he would be frequently visited by a well-behaved bear.

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From there I learned that he had a very good prayer rule, an awesome devotion to the Blessed Mother, was totally forgiving of some robbers who beat him up and permanently disabled him (why they would want to rob a hermit in the forest who basically had nothing is beyond me, but who knows), and was a cheerful and inspiring person. I further realized that on an old social media platform that predated Myspace and Facebook, I used to interact with this priest who went by the handle seraphimsarov and was called “Fr. Seraphim” and this priest’s social media was influential in getting me to think about going back to church even though I realize now (I didn’t at the time) he was Orthodox and I probably annoyed the heck out of him by being Catholic and by some of my comments. I had no idea at that time why he was using the handle “seraphimsarov” and I just assumed it was his own name.

I was rather astounded to read what happened to St. Seraphim’s relics after he was deceased, buried and less than a century later, canonized by the Orthodox. Apparently when Russia went Communist, his relics were lost in a cathedral they were trying to convert to the “Museum of Atheism”, found by chance at some point after Communism ended, and ended up being partially sent into space to orbit the earth.

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[Tis_Bearself]

…This evening I was reading a little more about St. Seraphim’s life in the course of looking for an appropriate prayer to pray for his feast day, since he’s not a Catholic saint and does not have an official Catholic collect prayer. (I ended up using the Common for a Monk out of the Roman Missal.) I decided to read about where he was from and discovered that Sarov, which had been regarded for a long time as a holy place by the Russian people, not least because this saint was from the monastery there, had been turned into the nuclear bomb development center for Russia.

It appears that when the Bolsheviks took over, they closed the monastery, executed a bunch of the monks, and the monastery ended up as a factory for rockets during WWII. Later the town of Sarov became the center for USSR nuclear bomb programs. The name of the town was also changed from Sarov to various other Soviet-sounding names, made a closed town and removed from most maps for years.

Apparently the town is still a closed town (restricted entry) and a center for nukes similar to the US city of Los Alamos. The Russian Federal Nuclear Center is there, also an Atomic Bomb museum. The good news is that they changed the name back to “Sarov”, put it back on the map, and the monastery inside the closed area is getting turned back into a monastery. There’s also a holy spring and a pilgrimage shrine for St. Seraphim apparently located on the area where he lived as a hermit, which is outside the closed area according to the map. His current gravesite isn’t affected because he’s interred in a convent in the next town over, about 10 miles away from the closed area.

St. Seraphim is also apparently the official patron saint of Russia’s nuclear weapons, which is bizarre to me as from all accounts he was very non-violent and forgiving. Perhaps his influence can keep people from “pushing the button”.

I realize the Soviets probably used a holy place for their rockets and nukes programs on purpose because of being so anti-religious. Russia is a huge place, why else pick that exact spot and put it there? But it blows my mind how obvious the manifestation of evil against good seems to be in this whole strange story.

P.S. I hope I have not said anything disrespectful to Eastern tradition in this post. If I did then please be aware it was completely unintentional on my part.