Aleksiy Tihonov
This article is dedicated to the publication of materials from the archive of the Russian St. Panteleimon Monastery on Mount Athos concerning the life of Archimandrite Lazarus (Moore). Fr. Lazarus was an Orthodox Englishman and the first clergyman of the Church of England to be received into the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. Because of the uniqueness of this case for the Russian emigration, and because the controversial issue of the validity of the Anglican priesthood had not yet been unequivocally resolved among the Orthodox Churches, the question of his conversion to Orthodoxy was specifically discussed by the Council of Bishops in the fall of 1935. Prior to the sessions of the Council, Archbishop Anastasius (Gribanovsky), who had taken the Englishman under his patronage and was preparing for the Council a report on his acceptance, organized trips to Yugoslavia and Mount Athos for the then priest Edgar Moore. As a consequence of his stay on the Holy Mountain, a number of documents were found in the archives of the Russian St. Panteleimon Monastery, as well as the Englishman’s contacts with several members of the monastery, in particular, with the future Archbishop of Brussels and Belgium, Basil (Krivoshein). He maintained these contacts until the late 1930s, when the outbreak of World War II made further interaction impossible. The published archival material is historically valuable, as it contains much information about Father Lazar’s preparation for conversion to Orthodoxy, about his trip to Mount Athos and then back to Yugoslavia, about his life in Palestine, where he served in the Church of Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane at the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem.