Feast of the Holy New Martyr Peter the Aleut, December 12

Vivid verbiage.

The tagline is unrelated, actually. It’s a seafaring phrase.

Orthodox ping on an American Orthodox Saint and Martyr for the Faith!

Troparion (Fourth Tone) [1]

Today Alaska rejoices and America celebrates,
For the new world has been sanctified by martyrdom.
Kodiak echoes with songs of thanksgiving,
Iliamna and Kenai observe the festival of faith.
The Apostle and martyr Juvenaly is glorified,
And Peter the Aleut is exalted by his voluntary sacrifice,
In their devotion and love for the Lord,
They willingly endured persecution and death for the Truth,
Now in the Kingdom of Heaven they intercede for our souls!

Kontakion (Fourth Tone)

Today Valaam joins Alaska
In celebrating this joyous feast,
As her spiritual son Juvenaly
Embraces the new martyr Peter with love.
Together they suffered for the Lord in America
And united the old world with the new by their voluntary sacrifice.
Now forever they stand before the King of glory and intercede for our souls.

Troparion (First Tone) [2]

O Peter, upon the rock of thy faith hath Christ built His Church,
and in the streams of thy blood hath He hallowed our land.
In thee thy people hath been sanctified, O Aleut;
from the farthest islands of the west hath He raised thee, a light unto all.
Glory to Him that hath glorified thee.
Glory to Him that hath crowned thee.
Glory to Him that worketh healings for all through thee

And I thought Islam was the only religion of Peace.
barbra ann

People of any religion, or none, can commit evil acts. Th

“Th”at was going to be another sentence, but the cat jumped on the keyboard.

My goodness! That is NOT how the Spanish Padres who established California’s Missions were depicted when I was growing up in CA. Who enacted this violence on him? Soldiers? Mis-informed lay persons? Hopefully not nuns, or priests, pray God.

There is preserved a report from a Russian eyewitness to the martyrdom. The report calls the priests Jesuits but in fact they were Franciscans.

“On another occasion I was relating to him how the Spanish in California had imprisoned fourteen Aleuts, and how the Jesuits were forcing all of them to accept the Catholic Faith. But the Aleuts would not agree under any circumstances, saying, ‘We are Christians.’ The Jesuits argued, ‘That’s not true, you are heretics and schismatics. If you do not agree to accept our faith then we will torture all of you to death.’ Then the Aleuts were placed in prisons two to a cell. That evening, the Jesuits came to the prison with lanterns and lighted candles. Again they tried to persuade two Aleuts in the cell to accept the Catholic Faith. ‘We are Christians,’ the Aleuts replied, ‘and we will not change our Faith.’ Then the Jesuits began to torture them, at first the one while his companion was a witness. They cut off one of the joints of his feet, and then the other joint. Then they cut the first joint on the fingers of his hands, and then the other joint. Then they cut off his feet, and his hands. The blood flowed, but the martyr endured all and firmly repeated one thing: “I am a Christian.’ He died in such suffering, due to a loss of blood. The Jesuit also promised to torture his comrade to death the next day.

But that night an order was received from Monterey stating that the imprisoned Aleuts were to be released immediately, and sent there under escort. Therefore, in the morning all were sent to Monterey with the exception of the dead Aleut. This was related to me by a witness, the same Aleut who had escaped torture, and who was the friend of the martyred Aleut. I reported this incident to the authorities in St Petersburg. When I finished my story, Father Herman asked, ‘What was the name of the martyred Aleut?’ I answered, ‘Peter. I do not remember his family name.’ The Elder stood reverently before an icon, made the Sign of the Cross and said, “Holy New Martyr Peter, pray to God for us”

It may be that the Franciscans were a demonic, rogue bunch as it appears that the surviving Aleuts were sent down to Monterey and released. The “Father Herman” referred to is St. Herman of Alaska. The witness, Simeon Yanovsky, ended his life as a monk. +Peter (big surprise) was a noted fisherman among his people or so the tradition says.

I would like to see the Spanish records on this. There were several Alaskan Natives (called Cayusus) brought into the missions. The Spanish were fully able to be this cruel. It would not have been a sanctioned act but the work of a zealot trying to save a soul. I am pleased to see the Russian Church once again working with their Alaskan converts. Maybe the new Pope can investigate this act further. What does Sarah Palin say about this new martyr?

It would interesting to see the Spanish records on this, I hope some enterprising scholar does an exhaustive study.

This account has some additional details, I dunno from where:

http://books.google.com/books?id=T8XGEq5cHZYC&pg=PA307&dq=peter+the+aleut&client=firefox-a&cd=2#v=onepage&q=peter%20the%20aleut&f=false

Was it an action of rogue friars? Was it a case of mob brutality over the friars’ objections? Someone in the San Fran archdiocese should get a historical inquest started on this. But what a barbarity nonetheless, and a true black mark against these Spaniards: +Peter, like St. Joan of Arc, killed unjustly at the hands of fellow Christians.

A holy, blessed day to Orthodox Christians as we too, commemorate a great feast of the Church in America: Our Lady of Guadalupe.

I love the Troparions and Kontakion. Thanks for posting them.

“I love the Troparions and Kontakion. Thanks for posting them.”

You are very welcome!

The story is not reliable. I know Wikipedia is not the best source, but thi is fascinating: "An account of the martyrdom of Peter the Aleut is contained in a lengthy letter written on Nov. 22, 1865, by Symeon Ivanovich Yanovsky to Damascene, abbot of the Valaam Monastery in Russia.[6][7] Yanovsky (1789-1876), who is also one of the chief sources of information about St. Herman of Alaska, was chief manager of the Russian colonies from 1818-1820. In the letter he was reporting on an incident that he had heard from a supposed eyewitness, and that had taken place in 1815, that is, a half a century earlier. The letter contains the description of Peter being tortured by "Jesuits": the Jesuit order had been suppressed in 1773, and had only been reconstituted in 1814. There were in 1815 no Jesuits within a thousand miles of California. There were Franciscans in California at the time. Yanovsky adds, "At the time I reported all this to the Head Office in St. Petersburg." And indeed, this earlier communication, his official dispatch to the company's main office—dated Feb. 15, 1820, five years after the event—also relates the story of St. Peter's martyrdom, albeit with different details.[8]" The icon of him was commissioned by a Jesuit: http://puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/icons/icon_peter_aleut.html The idea that Catholic priests in California, in 1815, would resort to torture and actually THEMSELVES cut off body parts is, well, laughable. Most likley poor Peter was killed because he was viewed as a spy for the Russians. Here's another weird thing: "According to the original account, the soldiers took them to "Mission San Pedro" (a qustionable location, as there was no mission at San Pedro) for interrogation..." http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Peter_the_Aleut This story is getting fishier and fishier. "Yanovsky also adds, "At the time I reported all this to the Head Office in St. Petersburg." And indeed, this earlier communication, his official dispatch to the company's main office—dated Feb. 15, 1820, five years after the event—also relates the story of St. Peter's martyrdom, albeit with different details." So, the story CHANGED? In a similar story - with no murdering of Aleuts - the Aleuts became Catholics rather quickly (sadly, they were pushed into it): http://books.google.com/books?id=q7e5opHZO7IC&pg=PA294&lpg=PA294&dq=russians+in+california+1815&source=bl&ots=uofx0Dh-Sf&sig=KrpzIpd-_gX5a4gUk6__A33hsg8&hl=en&ei=bbkjS6v9KIyqtgP7pt3gDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CBsQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=russians%20in%20california%201815&f=false And then just to complicate matters further: "Spanish records corroborate the capture of a party of Aleut hunters supervised by Boris Tarasov in 1815 but provide no detail of their treatment or specific mention of Peter or description of either his or his companion’s eventual fate (Pierce 1978: 177). However, there is a contemporaneous letter from Franciscan Fr. José Señan dated June 19, 1816 that runs counter to the story of forced conversion and violence against the Native hunters from Alaska: "It seems to me that there are good reasons for sending the four Russian Indians to your [the Santa Barbara] Presidio, all the more because you already have a countryman of theirs through whom pertinent and customary questioning could be conducted. "May God grant that they really want holy baptism, but I think there is not reason why it should be administered here except that the neophytes who brought them happened to belong to this Mission [San Buenaventura] and therefore they were the ones who said that the four wanted to be baptized. As for the Russian Indians themselves, I can hardly understand a word they say. But if they feel inclined to become members of our congregation of San Buenaventurea and if the Governor has no objections to their admittance to a mission, we can very well comply with their wishes (Cited in Farris: 8; Señan: 87)." http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2007/2007-3.html I wonder if poor Peter's family was being held hostage by his Russian overseers: "Aleut society was further disrupted by the Russian practice of taking hostages to ensure the hunters’ compliance. In 1790, one company held 300 hostages, which included 200 daughters of leaders to “encourage” a party of 600 hunters. Dmytryshyn details abuses of the Russian fur hunting operations that were almost entirely dependent on Aleut and Kodiak labor:" And the Russians were killing off more Aleuts than were the Spanish: "By 1790, the Aleut population was reduced by as much as two-thirds through practices of conscripted labor which was both physically debilitating and did not allow the families to prepare properly for their own sustenance through winter. Between 1792 and 1805 records show that 751 Kodiaks were killed in accidents (Gibson 1978: 363-64). There are, however, wide discrepancies in the reports on the numbers of Aleuts killed during the Russian period as exemplified by the Tlingit attack on the Russians and their Native allies at Fort Mikhailovskii, where the reports vary from 20 to 40 to over 200 Aleuts slaughtered (Grinev: 130)." and the real reason poor Peter was chopped up seems pretty clear: "The precipitating cause of violence in the story of Peter the Aleut was not over doctrine but over “soft gold”: furs, and access to the rich sea otter colonies off the coast of southern California. Russia expanded into the Alaskan peninsula and down to northern California to satisfy territorial ambitions, but Russians were also lured there by the diminishing numbers of sea otters in their other territories." And then there's this: "The three accounts of Peter’s martyrdom ultimately stem from the testimony of one witness and are related from the same account. Historians find the description of the Spanish treatment of Peter completely anomalous, which undermines the story’s credibility (Pierce 1990: 398). The geography in the account is quite confused and can only be tentatively reconstructed: Peter may have been captured at the port of San Pedro, first taken to Mission San Gabriel, then to Santa Barbara and finally to Monterey (Farris: 4). There was no Mission Saint Pedro." And then: "There are other anomalies in the account such as the lack of military guards in the proceedings. It is also highly unlikely that the priest or accompanying local Natives could speak enough Koniag Alutiiq to convey his demand to Peter, or that the Natives from Kodiak had mastered Spanish. Inconsistencies in the increasing elaborate description of the tortures inflicted on Peter seem manufactured to elicit outrage. There are simply no other incidents of Orthodox/Catholic conflict in this area as the Russians, mentioned in the first account of Peter’s martyrdom, depended on the Spanish for agricultural and other supplies and thus maintained cordial if distant relations. Unlike colonial forces such as England and France (and Spain in other areas), there were never any armed conflicts between the two powers. In fact, some Natives from the Russian colonies easily assimilated themselves to life in the Spanish colony (Farris: 8-9). It was otter and not orthodoxy that generate hostility between the groups." And wow: "Thus Jesuits can become antagonists in the third account of Peter’s martyrdom because of their larger negative reputation in Russia even though the Society of Jesus had been expelled from Spain and its possessions (including California) in 1767, suppressed by the Catholic Church from 1773 until 1814, and only returned to San Francisco in 1849.<4> Peter’s martyrdom becomes a proof of the cruelty of the Spanish Catholics, Catholic missionaries, and finally the Jesuits." http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2007/2007-3.html I can not help but conclude the story of the martyrdom, as a martyrdom, is probably a fraud.

Ugh, formatting died on me. The story is not reliable. I know Wikipedia is not the best source, but thi is fascinating: "An account of the martyrdom of Peter the Aleut is contained in a lengthy letter written on Nov. 22, 1865, by Symeon Ivanovich Yanovsky to Damascene, abbot of the Valaam Monastery in Russia.[6][7] Yanovsky (1789-1876), who is also one of the chief sources of information about St. Herman of Alaska, was chief manager of the Russian colonies from 1818-1820. In the letter he was reporting on an incident that he had heard from a supposed eyewitness, and that had taken place in 1815, that is, a half a century earlier. The letter contains the description of Peter being tortured by "Jesuits": the Jesuit order had been suppressed in 1773, and had only been reconstituted in 1814. There were in 1815 no Jesuits within a thousand miles of California. There were Franciscans in California at the time. Yanovsky adds, "At the time I reported all this to the Head Office in St. Petersburg." And indeed, this earlier communication, his official dispatch to the company's main office—dated Feb. 15, 1820, five years after the event—also relates the story of St. Peter's martyrdom, albeit with different details.[8]" The icon of him was commissioned by a Jesuit: http://puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/icons/icon_peter_aleut.html The idea that Catholic priests in California, in 1815, would resort to torture and actually THEMSELVES cut off body parts is, well, laughable. Most likley poor Peter was killed because he was viewed as a spy for the Russians. Here's another weird thing: "According to the original account, the soldiers took them to "Mission San Pedro" (a qustionable location, as there was no mission at San Pedro) for interrogation..." http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Peter_the_Aleut This story is getting fishier and fishier. "Yanovsky also adds, "At the time I reported all this to the Head Office in St. Petersburg." And indeed, this earlier communication, his official dispatch to the company's main office—dated Feb. 15, 1820, five years after the event—also relates the story of St. Peter's martyrdom, albeit with different details." So, the story CHANGED? In a similar story - with no murdering of Aleuts - the Aleuts became Catholics rather quickly (sadly, they were pushed into it): http://books.google.com/books?id=q7e5opHZO7IC&pg=PA294&lpg=PA294&dq=russians+in+california+1815&source=bl&ots=uofx0Dh-Sf&sig=KrpzIpd-_gX5a4gUk6__A33hsg8&hl=en&ei=bbkjS6v9KIyqtgP7pt3gDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CBsQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=russians%20in%20california%201815&f=false And then just to complicate matters further: "Spanish records corroborate the capture of a party of Aleut hunters supervised by Boris Tarasov in 1815 but provide no detail of their treatment or specific mention of Peter or description of either his or his companion’s eventual fate (Pierce 1978: 177). However, there is a contemporaneous letter from Franciscan Fr. José Señan dated June 19, 1816 that runs counter to the story of forced conversion and violence against the Native hunters from Alaska: "It seems to me that there are good reasons for sending the four Russian Indians to your [the Santa Barbara] Presidio, all the more because you already have a countryman of theirs through whom pertinent and customary questioning could be conducted. "May God grant that they really want holy baptism, but I think there is not reason why it should be administered here except that the neophytes who brought them happened to belong to this Mission [San Buenaventura] and therefore they were the ones who said that the four wanted to be baptized. As for the Russian Indians themselves, I can hardly understand a word they say. But if they feel inclined to become members of our congregation of San Buenaventurea and if the Governor has no objections to their admittance to a mission, we can very well comply with their wishes (Cited in Farris: 8; Señan: 87)." http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2007/2007-3.html I wonder if poor Peter's family was being held hostage by his Russian overseers: "Aleut society was further disrupted by the Russian practice of taking hostages to ensure the hunters’ compliance. In 1790, one company held 300 hostages, which included 200 daughters of leaders to “encourage” a party of 600 hunters. Dmytryshyn details abuses of the Russian fur hunting operations that were almost entirely dependent on Aleut and Kodiak labor:" And the Russians were killing off more Aleuts than were the Spanish: "By 1790, the Aleut population was reduced by as much as two-thirds through practices of conscripted labor which was both physically debilitating and did not allow the families to prepare properly for their own sustenance through winter. Between 1792 and 1805 records show that 751 Kodiaks were killed in accidents (Gibson 1978: 363-64). There are, however, wide discrepancies in the reports on the numbers of Aleuts killed during the Russian period as exemplified by the Tlingit attack on the Russians and their Native allies at Fort Mikhailovskii, where the reports vary from 20 to 40 to over 200 Aleuts slaughtered (Grinev: 130)." and the real reason poor Peter was chopped up seems pretty clear: "The precipitating cause of violence in the story of Peter the Aleut was not over doctrine but over “soft gold”: furs, and access to the rich sea otter colonies off the coast of southern California. Russia expanded into the Alaskan peninsula and down to northern California to satisfy territorial ambitions, but Russians were also lured there by the diminishing numbers of sea otters in their other territories." And then there's this: "The three accounts of Peter’s martyrdom ultimately stem from the testimony of one witness and are related from the same account. Historians find the description of the Spanish treatment of Peter completely anomalous, which undermines the story’s credibility (Pierce 1990: 398). The geography in the account is quite confused and can only be tentatively reconstructed: Peter may have been captured at the port of San Pedro, first taken to Mission San Gabriel, then to Santa Barbara and finally to Monterey (Farris: 4). There was no Mission Saint Pedro." And then: "There are other anomalies in the account such as the lack of military guards in the proceedings. It is also highly unlikely that the priest or accompanying local Natives could speak enough Koniag Alutiiq to convey his demand to Peter, or that the Natives from Kodiak had mastered Spanish. Inconsistencies in the increasing elaborate description of the tortures inflicted on Peter seem manufactured to elicit outrage. There are simply no other incidents of Orthodox/Catholic conflict in this area as the Russians, mentioned in the first account of Peter’s martyrdom, depended on the Spanish for agricultural and other supplies and thus maintained cordial if distant relations. Unlike colonial forces such as England and France (and Spain in other areas), there were never any armed conflicts between the two powers. In fact, some Natives from the Russian colonies easily assimilated themselves to life in the Spanish colony (Farris: 8-9). It was otter and not orthodoxy that generate hostility between the groups." And wow: "Thus Jesuits can become antagonists in the third account of Peter’s martyrdom because of their larger negative reputation in Russia even though the Society of Jesus had been expelled from Spain and its possessions (including California) in 1767, suppressed by the Catholic Church from 1773 until 1814, and only returned to San Francisco in 1849.<4> Peter’s martyrdom becomes a proof of the cruelty of the Spanish Catholics, Catholic missionaries, and finally the Jesuits." http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2007/2007-3.html I can not help but conclude the story of the martyrdom, as a martyrdom, is probably a fraud.

Well, I tried to format the post, but it just AIN’T workin’ for some reason.

May the Lord Bless Saint the Aleut with everlasting joy.

May the Lord forgive his tormentors...

Posters may find that when text is posted with significant amounts of non-alphabetic, non-numeric characters and symbols, the FR editor will interpret these as html commands, and the entire post will be thrown into html. Thus, where there are no explicit html paragraph breaks, the editor will interpret the text as having no paragraph breaks.

To successfully post text like this requires either removing all characters in the text that can be interpreted as html, or at the very least, inserting the necessary paragraph breaks by hand, which look like this, but without the spaces between the characters: < p >

You could be right Vlad. The Orthodox Church, however, believes the story and canonized +Peter.

Personally, I don’t see this story as a condemnation of either the Latin Church or the Spanish. The idea that 200 years ago Spanish monks, zealots under the influence of demons and whose traditions in the New World were not entirely, shall we say, irenic, might have killed an Orthodox Aleut under torture doesn’t seem all that fantastic to me. As you know, the Orthodox here on FR in the 21st century have been castigated by Latins as schismatics. 200 years ago matters often went beyond name calling.

BTW, you are of course correct that the “political” problems out on the West Coast at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries between Spain and Russia had to do with furs, not the proper manner of making the Cross!

Sitetest,

Since I was the one with the posting problem you might as well have posted that to my name in this thread.