Passengers sharing Bishop Nicholas’s Moscow-bound flight found his blessings faintly silly — but that was when the engines were still running.
St Nicholas Mogilevsky (1877-1955) was Bishop of Alma-Ata (Almaty) in Kazakhstan during the Soviet era. He endured repeated imprisonment and ill-use at the hands of the Nazis, the Communists and state-sponsored Church ‘modernisers’ with remarkable forbearance. This is just one of several tales from his own lifetime.