Nikolai Alekseev (Catholic priest)

Biography

Born on January 21, 1869 in Vyborg in a family of a Colonel. Alekseev made the gymnasium and the Swedish school in Helsinki, Finland. In 1897 he was tonsured a monk and ordained a deacon in the Trinity-Sergius Hermitage, Saint Petersburg. In 1899 sent as a representative of the Russian Orthodox Mission in Seoul. In 1901 ordained to the priesthood.

From 1904 to 1906 he was forced break in the Mission, because of the outbreak of Russian-Japanese War. Father Nikolai Alekseev, along with other Russian clergy, left Seoul. They found a temporary refuge in neighboring China. Missionaries moved to Shanghai, where it was the Beijing branch of the Orthodox mission. Some time later, Alexeyev was invited to continue his ministry in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, being ordained an abbot. During the Civil War deputized Bishop Nestor of Kamchatka, went to China. Nikolai Alekseev moved to Vladivostok, from where later moved to Harbin. In 1925 the Synod of Bishops of ROCOR elevated to the rank of Archimandrite and transferred to Beijing.

In Beijing, Nikolai Alekseev expressed a desire to join the Catholic Church, in 1927 he settled in the Franciscan monastery in Tsinanfu, where he studied Catholic theology. In 1928 in Beijing formally converted to Catholicism, where the Apostolic Delegate Archbishop Celso Benigno Luigi Costantini made a ritual of joining him to Catholic Church. Alekseev founded in Shanghai a Russian Greek-Catholic parish, after the Second World War he emigrated to Argentina.

In Argentina, he lived in the monastery of Saint Michael (Spanish: San Miguel) and served in the Russian parish of Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in Buenos Aires. In 1951 Alekseev in Argentina began to help the priest George Kovalenko. Nikolai Alekseev died on April 23, 1952 at the age of 82 years.