Protopresbyter Valeriy Alekseyev died. Eternal Memory!
Protopresbyter Valeriy Alekseyev died on April 7, 2011, at 1800 on the feast day of the Annunciation.
Protopresbyter Valeriy Alekseyev was born on February 16March 1, 1937, in Odessa and was baptized in the church at the St. Dmitriy cemetery. His father, Boris Andreyevich Alekseyev, and mother, Vera Petrovna Alekseyeva-Grossul-Tolstaya, were both Orthodox.
Fr. Valeriy’s mother was persecuted for fifteen years as a member of the nobility and landed gentry. Fr. Valeriy’s father was a lieutenant in General Denikin’s army and earned the Order of St. George, Imperial Russia's highest military order. During World War II, he was a member of the Russian All-Military Union and Russian Corps in Serbia. He was repatriated later to the Soviet Union. He was trained as a medical doctor. He was sentenced to the prison camps for 15 years in 1950. He was rehabilitated posthumously in 1993. The family lived in a house in Odessa on the same street and near the house of the Aleksandrov family, who were parents of ROCA Bishop Daniel.
From the age of seven, Fr. Valeriy was an altar attendant in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Equal to the Apostles, which was known as the “church of the Russian officers.” Orphaned by the death of his mother, who died at an early age from tuberculosis, and his father’s imprisonment, he had a difficult childhood and equally difficult teenage years. The love of life in the church was felt from an early age and formed the basis for the rest of his life. He began reading on the kliros of the Holy Trinity Church in Odessa, and in the 1970’s, he entered the second class of the Leningrad Theological Seminary. He completed his studies at the Moscow Theological Seminary. Fr. Valeriy was consecrated a reader, then later a subdeacon and ordained a deacon on October 27, 1994. He was ordained a priest on November 4, 1994. He served in parishes of the Tulsk-Belevsk, Kirovogradsk, Nikolayevsk and Odessa dioceses of the MP. Fr. Valeriy was later named dean of the Izmailovsk district and taught comparative religion and sectology at the Odessa Theological Seminary. He was also the secretary of the MP Odessa diocese administration.
Fr. Valeriy never supported “sergianist” church policies and fought for the truth at every assignment in the church. After long considerations of his life in the church, a pastor’s duty, responsibility before God and his personal salvation, and the grave violations of dogma by the MP episcopate, he decided to join the Russian True Orthodox Church, which was a jurisdiction of the ROCOR Synod of Bishops at that time (it was registered as a ROCA diocese in 2004). He joined as a priest on November 2, 1997, after completing the rite of penitence as instructed by the Holy Gospel, “And ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free.”
Fr. Valeriy was the rector of the Church of Holy Martyr Tsarevich Aleksy since March 15, 1997. He also served as dean of the Odessa deanery since February 23, 2001, chairman of the Spiritual Court of the diocese since February 5, 2002, and dean of the Sts. Cyril and Methodius theological seminary since 1998.
In his years as a priest, Fr. Valeriy was awarded the right to wear a kamilavka, a epigonation (nabedrennik), and a pectoral cross. He became an archpriest in 1986 and was later awarded a palitza, a jeweled cross and a mitre. Fr. Valeriy was elevated to the rank of protopresbyter in May, 2010.
On April 4, 2011, at 17:00 Fr. Valeriy suffered a brain hemorrhage and was taken to the hospital. He never regained consciousness.
Protopresbyter Valeriy died on April 7, 2011, at 1800 on the feast day of the Annunciation.
Eternal Memory!