Priest and Army Chaplain
Before his monastic life, Mitrofan Srebryansky was a married parish priest, serving at Orel from 1896. During the Russo-Japanese War he accompanied troops to the front as a regimental chaplain with the 51st Chernigov regiment, taking part in the fighting near Lyaoyan and Mukden.
His diary of those years was serialized in a Russian journal and published in 1906; it was through this published account of his chaplaincy, the sources relate, that Grand Duchess Elizabeth came to know of him and invited him to Moscow.
The Marfo-Mariinsky Convent
Though reluctant to leave his flock at Orel, Father Mitrofan accepted the position of father-confessor and superior of the Martha-Mary (Marfo-Mariinsky) Convent in Moscow, the community of sisters of mercy founded by Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna. The Orthodox America account records that he daily served the Divine Liturgy and gave lectures three times a week.
His marriage to Olga was childless, and the couple made a monastic commitment, living as brother and sister; both later received monastic tonsure, he as Sergius and she as the nun Elizabeth. After the Grand Duchess's arrest in 1918 he continued to shepherd the convent community until the monastery was closed by the Soviet authorities in the mid-1920s.
Persecution and Confession
From 1923 onward, Archimandrite Sergius was repeatedly arrested and exiled under the Soviet regime. The Orthodox America account records that he spent some sixteen years in various prisons and camps before settling in exile at Vladychnya in the Tver region following his release in 1933.
He reposed there in 1948. It is for this endurance of imprisonment and exile in faith that he is numbered among the confessors rather than as a martyr by violent death.
Relics & Shrines
He was buried in the village cemetery at Vladychnya. Two years after his repose, when his wife was interred in the same grave, his body was found to be incorrupt, and local veneration of him began.
