September 4 · Gorazd of Prague

Gorazd of Prague · Read aloud

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The Church remembers more than one name on the fourth of September.

She remembers the Prophet Moses, who saw God in the bush that burned and was not consumed. She remembers the old bishop Babylas of Antioch, and the children who stood with him. Those are true days. We will not tell those whole lives this morning.

Today she asks us to hear a newer name.

His name was Gorazd. Before that, his name was Matthias Pavlik. He was born in the year 1879, in a Moravian town called Hrubá Vrbka — a little place that would later lie in the Czech lands. He was born into a Roman Catholic family. He went to the seminary in Olomouc. He was ordained a priest.

Then the great war ended, and a new country was made: Czechoslovakia. The old laws that had required the Catholic religion were loosened. Father Matthias, and thousands with him, left that Church. Many of them were looking for a home in the Orthodox Church — the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius, who had first brought the Faith to those lands. In those years that Church in that region stood under the protection of the Orthodox Church of Serbia.

He took monastic vows. He was given a new name: Gorazd.

The first Gorazd had been a disciple of Saints Cyril and Methodius, and he had succeeded Saint Methodius as bishop of Moravia. The Church gave this man that name so the old mission would not be forgotten.

When he was forty-two years old, they made him a bishop.

It was the twenty-fifth of September, in the year 1921, in Belgrade. The Serbian Patriarch Dimitri consecrated him, together with Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky of Kiev, and other bishops, including Bishop Dositheus of Zagreb. He was made Bishop of Moravia and Silesia.

The Church still keeps the words that were prayed over him that day. They are the words the Church prays when she makes a bishop.

"O Lord, make this man also, who has been proclaimed a steward of the episcopal grace, to be an imitator of You, the true Shepherd, Who laid down Your life for Your sheep."

Those are the Church's words. We will not invent others.

And the Gospel she set beside that prayer is the Lord's own:

"I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep."

He went to work at once.

He built eleven churches and two chapels. He translated the service books into the Czech language, so that his people could pray in the words of their own mouth. He paid particular attention to the Carpatho-Rusyns in the east of that land, who were returning to the Orthodox Faith of their ancestors.

He remained a bishop for twenty years. He remained Orthodox when people tried to pull him back. When some Catholic priests rose up against him, a Catholic bishop named Stoian said a true thing, and the Church still keeps the words:

"Leave Pavlik alone, you are not worthy to tie his laces, it would be good if everyone were like Pavlik."

Those are the Church's words. We will not invent others.

Then the country was taken.

The German army came in 1938. The Orthodox Church in those lands was placed under the Orthodox metropolitan in Berlin, Metropolitan Seraphim. A high official of the occupiers was later killed. Some of the men who had done it were hidden in the crypt of the Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius — the Church's own house in Prague.

When Bishop Gorazd learned of this, he understood the danger. Not only for himself. For his priests. For the people who came to that cathedral to pray. For the little Church he had spent twenty years building.

He was about to leave for Berlin, to take part in the consecration of a priest as a bishop. Before he went, he insisted that the men leave the cathedral and find another place.

They were still there on the eighteenth of June. The hiding place was found. The men were killed.

We will not stay in that crypt. We will not tell the manner of it. The Church names the cathedral so we know whose house it was. Then she turns to the bishop.

The occupiers began to punish the whole Church.

The two priests of that cathedral were arrested, and the senior lay people with them. Bishop Gorazd tried to save his people and his church. He did not hide the truth, and he did not hand the blame to anyone else. He wrote letters to the authorities. He took the blame himself.

The Church still keeps the words he wrote:

"I am giving myself up to the authorities and am prepared to face any punishment, including death."

Those are the Church's words. We will not invent others.

Think about that for a moment.

A bishop's work is not to keep himself safe. His work is to keep his people. He had built the churches. He had put the prayers into Czech. He had told the hidden men to go. And when the danger did not pass, he put his own name on the letter.

He was arrested on the twenty-seventh of June, in the year 1942. On the fourth of September he was put to death, at the place the Church names: the shooting range at Kobylisy. He was sixty-three years old.

The two cathedral priests were also put to death. The Church says that hundreds of people died in the punishment that followed. She also names a village, Lidice, that was destroyed. We will not stay with that. We say the name so we know how wide the harm was. Then we return to the bishop who tried to stand in the way of it.

After he died, the Orthodox Church in Bohemia and Moravia was closed. The churches were shut. The priests were sent away.

He had given himself up so that his flock might be spared. The occupiers did not spare them. The Church still calls him a shepherd, because he did the shepherd's work anyway.

Years later the Orthodox Church of Serbia recognized him as a new martyr, on the fourth of May, 1961. On the twenty-fourth of August, 1987, he was glorified in the Cathedral of Saint Gorazd in Olomouc — the same city where he had once gone to seminary. His feast is this day, the day of his martyrdom.

The word we heard this morning is a weekday word, not a saint's own pair. The apostles gave Paul the right hand of fellowship, and asked only that he remember the poor. Gorazd received that kind of fellowship from the Church of Serbia, and from Metropolitan Anthony, and he remembered his own poor Church: he built her houses, and he put the Gospel into her language. And the Lord says, in the house of Jairus, "Be not afraid, only believe." That is not a story about Gorazd raising a child. It is the word the Church reads on the morning she says his name. He wrote that he was prepared to die. He did not ask the people at home to be brave in his place.

And today, on the day the Church still keeps as his own, we say his name once more, out loud, together — Hieromartyr Gorazd of Prague — and he is praying for us still.