Saint Matrona of Moscow
Blind eldress of Moscow
- Feast day
- May 2
- Lived
- 1881–1952
- Patronage
- The blind and disabled, families, those in Soviet-era distress
Born blind and later paralysed, Saint Matrona of Moscow received thousands of people in cramped Soviet apartments, praying for them and telling them plainly what to do.
Life
Matrona Nikonova was born in Tula province to a poor peasant family, blind from birth and without eyeballs. From childhood she was aware of things she could not have known and healed the sick who came to the village; at seventeen her legs failed and she never walked again.
After the revolution she moved to Moscow, living wherever she was taken in, moving constantly to avoid arrest, and receiving up to forty people a day. She was never denounced, though she was interrogated. During the war she told mothers and wives which soldiers were alive and which were not.
Veneration
She died in 1952 saying, 'Come to me all of you and tell me your sorrows as if I were alive.' Her relics were translated in 1998 to the Intercession Convent in Moscow, and she was glorified in 1999. The queue at her shrine is among the longest at any Orthodox church in the world.