Friday, November 11, 2005

Anastasia Georgievna Schatiloff, Daughter of Bishop Gregory (Grabbe) and Noted Russian Diaspora Church Writer, Reposes in the Lord

(Portal-Credo.Ru, Vertograd, New York)

In the eighty-first year of her life, Anastasia Georgievna Schatiloff, née Countess Grabbe, daughter of Bishop Gregory Grabbe, one of the main ideologues of the ROCOR, reposed in New York. She passed away at about 9:00 PM local time on November 1st in one of the hospitals of the New York area, to which she had been hurriedly transferred from a nursing home. A.G. Schatiloff had been at the nursing home undergoing rehabilitation therapy, after a serious accident she sustained towards the end of August on the staircase of the Synodal headquarters building of the ROAC in Suzdal, during which several of the vertebrae in her neck were broken.

A.G. Schatiloff was born on April 27, 1925, in Yugoslavia (then a kingdom comprised of Serbs, Croatians and Slovenians). She was the great-great-granddaughter of the Russian philosopher A.S. Khomiakov, and the granddaughter of P.S. Grabbe, a notable participant in the 1917-1918 Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church. Since the 1950’s, A.G. Schatiloff had been assisting her father, Protopresbyter George Grabbe (later Bishop Gregory), Secretary of the Synod of Bishops of the ROCOR.

During the last years of her life, Anastasia Georgievna published the bulletin Church News, an Independent Publication Dedicated to Russian Church Thought, in which special attention was paid to the process of "capitulation" by the ROCOR in connection with its upcoming unification with the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, and to the rebirth and growth of Orthodox parishes independent from the Moscow Patriarchate in Russia.

Metropolitan Valentine was not able to attend her funeral. On October 31 he was admitted to the hospital in Switzerland to treat the gangrene that had developed on his foot in September. Metropolitan Valentine will stay in Swiss hospital within next month.