The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism - St. Justin Popovic

Archimadrite Justin was born in Vranje on the Feast of the Annunciation, 1894, of parents Spiridon and Anastasija. He stud-ied at the Seminary of Saint Sava in Belgrade from 1905 to 1914. During the First World War, he retreated to Skadar with the Serbian army, where, with the blessing of Metropolitan Dimitrije, he received monastic profession in 1916, tak-ing the name of Saint Justin the martyr and philosopher. His secular name had been Blagoje. Metropolitan Dimitrije sent him for further study to Petrograd and Oxford. He returned to Belgrade after the war, and was appointed as an assistant at the seminary in Sremski Karlovci. He received his doctorate of Athens University in 1926, with the doctoral thesis: 'The Problem of the Person and of Knowledge according to Saint Makarios of Egypt'. On his return to Sremski Karlovci, he edited the periodical 'Christian Life'. Transferred to the Prizren seminary, and then sent back to Karlovci in 1931, he worked alongside Metropolitan Josif Cvijović in the Carpathian area of Czechoslovakia, organising church life among the Carpatho-Russians. On his return, he was transferred to the Bitolj sem-inary, and was chosen in 1934 to be professor of Dogmatics and Comparative Theology at the Theological Faculty in Belgrade. He remained in this position until the end of the war, at which time the communist authoritities removed him from his work in the university. After this, he lived in various monasteries in Serbia, and in 1948 went to the monastery of Ćelije near Valjevo, where he remained until his death as the monastery's spiritual father. He devoted himself completely to prayer and to theological and scientific work and translation, to which his very many published and unpublished works bear witness. He entered into rest in the Lord on the Feast of the Annunciation, 1979.