Hierarch Paul Of Tobolsk

Saint Paul (Konyuskevich), Metropolitan of Tobolsk and Siberia, was born Peter Konyuskevich in 1705 in Sambir (western Ukraine, then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth). He studied at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, took monastic vows at 28, and for some fifteen years served as archimandrite of the Yuriev Monastery near Novgorod, overseeing extensive building work. In 1758 he was consecrated bishop and appointed Metropolitan of Tobolsk and Siberia, the largest and most remote see in the Russian Church. There he reformed theological education, opened Siberia's first full seminary course, invited learned monastics from Kiev, and built roughly twenty stone churches, combining strict discipline toward unworthy clergy with notable personal charity toward the poor. When Catherine II's government secularized monastic and church lands in the 1760s, Paul, together with Metropolitan Arseny (Matseyevich), openly protested the inadequate compensation offered to the Church. Summoned to Moscow in 1767 and pressured to submit, he instead asked to retire to the Kiev Caves Lavra, where he lived out his final years and died on November 4, 1770. His relics, found incorrupt in 1827, were later moved to the Lavra's Far Caves; he received general Church glorification on June 22, 2008.