…After the war, a neighbor who lived two houses away from them and worked in the village council called Vitaly. The order came from “those” authorities: either a written renunciation or execution.
— Renounce? From God? Even if I cut my head with an ax, I won’t flinch! Here, on the threshold, I’ll put it myself, I won’t flinch — chop it.
No chopping was needed. He was already holding the rifle with his hands, and the fighter against “bourgeois remnants” fired. The bullet burned the chest, burned a hole through the shirt, but ricocheted off the cross on the body of the shooter and shot off the finger of the shooter.
The priest survived another execution eight years later, already in Pochaev. Call to Kremenets. Shooting again. The hole in the cassock was smoking, but this time the bullet was “prevented” by my mother’s little leather-bound pocket Gospel. And 3 days later the shooter, the head of the local KGB, was shot while hunting: he was lying behind the bushes and sunbathing; The dogs, scouring for game, ran into him and began to bark. The hunters thought that there was an animal there. The Lord’s scales are accurate and judgment will not delay; True, not everyone will consider this trial — the call of another soul to the Judgment of God was recognized as an accident. “Well, I got what I wanted,” Fr. later said with sorrow. Macarius. And often later we heard from the priest the words of his elders: “Death is not scary, deeds are scary — it’s not death that we should be afraid of, but sin!”
Biography of Schema-Archimandrite Macarius (Bolotov)
Holy Land Charitable Foundation
Investment in the Soul!
