Venerable Catherine
Abbess of Lesna and Hopovo
1850-1925
Countess Evgenia Borisovna Efimovski, after her tonsure, Catherine, studied literature and theology, and afterwards occupied herself with missionary and charity work. In October of 1885 she founded the Convent of Lesna with the blessing of the famous Elder Ambrose of Optina. In its time the Lesna Convent community numbered up to 500 nuns who took care of over a thousand orphans. St. John of Kronsdadt and Imperor Nicholas II became the convent’s sponsors.
After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, upon the invitation of Serbian Patriarch Dimitry, Mother Catherine came to Serbia with her sisterhood to the Frushka Gora monastery of Hopovo. From 1920 to 1941, thanks to Abbesss Catherine, the Hopovo Convent “hatched” over thirty new monastic communities, and thus renewed women’s monasticism with more than thirty monasteries. Mother Catherine thus can be rightly considered the renewer of Serbian monasticism. Abbess Catherine reposed in peace in the Hopovo Convent on the10th of November, 1925.
In 1943 the Communists set fire to Hopovo. The sisters moved to Belgrade, and afterwards, in 1950, they succeeded in emigrating to France. With the whole-hearted help of St. John of Shanghai, the Lesna-Hopovo sisterhood established its new monastery in the village of Provemont in Normandy (France). The Lesna Convent in France became one of the most important monasteries of the Russian diaspora in which St. Philaret, third in line of the first hierarchs of the Russian Church Abroad especially liked to stay.
As a result of their disagreement with the decision of the Synod of the Russian Church Abroad to unite with the ecumenist and serganist Moscow Patriarchate, in 2007 the Lesna Convent went beneath the omophorion of Archbishop Tikhon, the first hierarch of the Russian True Orthodox Church.
During the Second World War, after the burning and demolition of the Hopovo Convent by the Partisans, Mother Catherine’s grave was left unmarked. On Transfiguration in 1984, the grave of Mother Catherine was uncovered, and within it, her incorrupt body. An eyewitness, Archimandrite Dositheus from the Grgeteg Monastery confirmed that they found her incorrupt body, clothes and cross her chest as if she had been buried yesterday. The Lesna-Hopovo Abbess Mother Catherine was listed among the assembly of the holy saints of Russia by the resolution of the Holy Synod of the Russian True Orthodox Church in the festive ceremony of canonization at Lesna Convent in October of 2010.
Venerable Mother Catherine, Pray to God for us!