Venerable Justin Of Celije

Venerable Justin, secular name Blagoje Popović, was born on March 25, 1894 (the very Feast of the Annunciation) in the town of Vranje in southern Serbia, to the priest Spiridon Popović — the seventh generation of a priestly family. Of eight children, only three survived to adulthood.

He graduated from the St. Sava Seminary in Belgrade (1914), where one of his teachers was the future St. Nikolai (Velimirović), who recognized the young man's exceptional theological and literary gift. During World War I he served as a medical orderly in a hospital in Niš and endured the harrowing retreat of the Serbian army through Kosovo and Albania (1915) — an experience that left a deep mark on his theology of suffering.

On the night of January 1, 1916, in Shkodra (Albania), he was tonsured a monk with the name Justin — in honor of the Martyr Justin the Philosopher. He continued his education at the Petrograd Theological Academy (1916), then, owing to the Revolution, at Oxford University (1916-1919; his dissertation on Dostoevsky was rejected as "excessively Orthodox" — Justin refused to rewrite it), and finally defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Athens (1926) on the teaching of human personality in St. Macarius of Egypt.

He was ordained a hieromonk in 1922. He taught at the seminaries of Sremski Karlovci, Prizren, and Bitola, and from 1934 was docent of dogmatic theology at the Belgrade Theological Faculty; he founded the Serbian Philosophical Society (1938). In 1946 he was dismissed from teaching by the new communist authorities and briefly imprisoned.

From May 1948 until the end of his life he was spiritual father of the women's Monastery of Ćelije near Valjevo, where for over 30 years he lived under de facto house arrest (denied a passport, under constant surveillance, barred from public activity). There he produced his major works: the 12-volume "Lives of the Saints," arranged by the days of the church calendar and furnished with his own dogmatic-philosophical commentary, and the 3-volume "Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church" — a systematic exposition of Orthodox doctrine centered on the God-Man Christ as the focus of all theology and of human personhood ("man can become either a god or a devil"). Among his disciples at Ćelije were future prominent hierarchs and theologians of the Serbian Church, including Metropolitan Amfilohije (Radović).

He reposed on March 25, 1979 — the Feast of the Annunciation, the same day he was born. He was buried by the south side of the monastery's altar beneath a simple stone cross.

He was canonized by the Bishops' Council of the Serbian Orthodox Church on April 29, 2010, in the rank of the Venerable. The Russian Orthodox Church added his name to its own calendar on June 6, 2012. His relics were uncovered on June 12, 2014, and translated to the newly built Church of St. Sava at Ćelije.

His feast is kept on June 1/14 — the feast day of his patron, Martyr Justin the Philosopher, whose name he took at tonsure.

IMPORTANT CORRECTIONS: category righteous→venerable (Justin was a monk, hieromonk, and later archimandrite — not a layman), title Righteous→Venerable. His life dates have been corrected from the erroneously copied dates of Justin Martyr ("c. 100 — c. 165") to the correct "1894-1979." The canonization year has been corrected: 2010 (Bishops' Council of the SOC), not 2012 (which was merely the date of inclusion in the Russian Church's calendar).