Grand Duchess Elizabeth at Saint Thomas Church

I've been listening to the webcasts of New York's Saint Thomas Church for over 15 years, attending in person as often as possible between 2007 and 2019. I am pleased that today's Solemn Evensong, which you can watch and hear online, features a sermon on Grand Duchess St. Elizabeth of Russia (1864-1918), one of Westminster Abbey's ten Modern Martyrs, by Mo. Susan Hill of NYC's Church of the Holy Apostles. This sermon is part of Saint Thomas's Lenten series, "'A Grain of Wheat': Martyrs of Our Time." Mo. Hill skillfully links Elizabeth's holy life to the needs of our contemporary world.

Daughter of Grand Duke Louis IV of Hesse (1837-1892) and Queen Victoria's daughter Princess Alice of the United Kingdom (1843-1878), Elizabeth was considered one of the most beautiful princesses of her generation. In 1884, having rejected other suitors including the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, she married Grand Duke Sergei of Russia (1857-1905), at which occasion her younger sister Princess Alix (1872-1918) first met her future husband, Sergei's nephew who later became Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918). Not required by Russian law to convert to Orthodoxy since her husband was not in direct line to the throne, she nevertheless did so voluntarily several years later. After her husband's assassination in 1905, she renounced her glittering royal lifestyle for one of heroic service to the poor of Moscow as a nun. She had little political influence on her sister or on subsequent events in Russia, but the Revolution showed her no mercy. In July 1918, the day after the more famous Ekaterinburg murders, she and her companion Sister Barbara and several other members of the imperial family (including Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, a brother of the subject of my previous post) were murdered by the Bolsheviks in Alapayevsk, a location (now a monastery) which I visited in 2018 several days before the centennial. She was canonized in 1981 by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and in 1992 by the Moscow Patriarchate. 

I have no doubt that current events in her adopted homeland would grieve her deeply, but she would do what she always did and try to help those in need as much as she could.