On the second Sunday after Pentecost, each local Orthodox Church commemorates all the saints, known and unknown, who have shown forth in its land. Accordingly, the Orthodox Church in America remembers the saints of North America on this day.

Saints of all times, and in every country are seen as the fulfillment of God’s promise to redeem fallen humanity. Their example encourages us to “lay aside every weight, and sin which so easily besets us” and to “run with patience the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1). The saints of North America also teach us how we should live, and what we must expect to endure as Christians.

The very first Divine Liturgy served in North America took place aboard a ship captained by Vitus Bering, on July 20, 1741, the Feast of the Prophet Elias. The serving clergy were Hieromonk Hilarion Trusov and Priest Ignatius Kozirevsky. Several years later Russian merchant Gregory I. Shelikov visited Valaam monastery, suggesting to the abbot that is would be desirable to send missionaries to Russian America.  On September 24, 1794, after a journey of 7,327 miles (the longest missionary journey in the Orthodox Church’s history) and 293 days, a group of monks from Valaam arrived on Kodiak Island in Alaska. Among the monks was the future St. Herman of Alaska, the last surviving member who fell asleep in the Lord in 1837.

Although we are a young church, the Orthodox Church in America has produced saints in nearly all six categories of saints: Apostles (and equal to the Apostles); Martyrs and Confessors; Prophets; Hierarches; Monastics; and the Righteous. Prophets, of course, lived in Old Testament times and predicted the coming of Christ. Our Church has two martyrs, Juvenal of Lake Iliamna by natives in 1799 and Peter the Aleut who was put to death in 1816 by Spanish missionaries in California when he refused to convert to Roman Catholicism. Missionary efforts to the native peoples of Alaska in the 19th century carried out by St. Innocent Veniaminov and Jacob Netsvetov. St. Innocent, after losing his wife, eventually became Metropolitan of Moscow and died in 1879 and Saint Jacob died in 1864 in Sitka after a life of translating service books into various native languages.

Saint Tikhon, the only Bishop of the American continent in 1898 and who founded my former community in Calhan, CO, in 1905, eventually became Patriarch of Moscow and died in 1925 under communist house arrest. St. Raphael of Brooklyn, the first Orthodox Bishop to be consecrated in North America. In the 20th century, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, countless men, women and children received the crown of martyrdom rather than renounce Christ. St. John Kochurov and Alexander Hotovitzky both served in America before returning to Russia. St. John Kochirov is the first clergyman to be martyred under the soviets in 1937. Of course the great example of Motherhood, Matushka Olga Michael of Alaska!  (OCA website)