(RNS) — A Native Alaskan midwife known for her healing love, especially toward abused women, has become the first female Orthodox Christian saint from North America after she was glorified at a meeting of bishops of the Orthodox Church in America in Chicago this week.
Expected for more than a year, her glorification is the result of a bottom-up process that begins with lay members’ veneration and the gathering of accounts of holiness by a church committee. Unlike Catholicism, the Orthodox do not require miracles to confirm a saint, but some women have credited Olga with miraculous intercessions.
On Nov. 2, Bishop Alexei of Sitka and Alaska wrote a letter to the OCA’s highest-ranking cleric, Metropolitan Tikhon, formally requesting that she be considered for sainthood.
“The first peoples of Alaska are convinced of her sanctity and the great efficacy of her prayers,” he wrote.
The synod then agreed in a Nov. 8 statement that “the time for the glorification of Matushka Olga has arrived, fulfilling the hopes and prayers of pious Orthodox Christians throughout Alaska and the entire world,” using an honorific for priests’ wives in the Russian Orthodox Church.
“The Holy Synod determined that the time for Matushka’s glorification is now simply based upon its prayerful reflection and the growing witness to her holiness expressed through the voice of the Faithful,” Archbishop Daniel of Chicago and the Midwest, who serves on the synod, told RNS in an email. “In other words, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.”
Olga, named Arrsamquq when she was born into the Yupik tribe in 1916, knitted mittens and sewed leather and fur boots for her rural Alaskan community and often gave away her family’s few possessions to help others in need. She assisted pregnant women through childbirth and shared their joy and grief.
After an arranged marriage to a local hunter and fisherman who founded the village’s first general store and post office before becoming a priest later in life, she gave birth to 13 babies of her own, only eight of whom survived to adulthood.
Church accounts credit Olga’s prayers for her husband’s embrace of the church but do not say whether Olga suffered abuse herself. She died in 1979.
Above all, Olga is remembered for spiritually healing abused women, inviting them into the intimate space of a traditional wooden Yupik sauna, where neither bruises nor emotions could hide, and conversation flowed freely.
Olga will officially become the 14th North American Orthodox Christian saint, and the only woman in that group, in a ceremony yet to be scheduled. Her ancestors reportedly converted to Orthodoxy after hearing the teachings of the Aleut missionary Iakov Netsvetov (1802-1864), now known as St. Jacob. St. Herman, a Russian Orthodox monk and missionary to Alaska in the late 1700s and early 1800s, when it was part of Russia, was the first North American to be canonized by the church.
The Rev. Vasily Fisher, parish priest of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Kwethluk, Alaska, where St. Olga lived, said her glorification means “a great deal” to the Yupik community there.
