Blessed Procopius of Vyatka

Blessed Procopius of Vyatka was a Russian fool-for-Christ commemorated on December 21. According to the synaxarion he was the son of devout peasants. When he reached the age of twenty and his parents wished him to marry, he left secretly for the city of Khlynov (later Vyatka) and there took upon himself the demanding ascetic path of foolishness for Christ, a form of holiness that conceals spiritual gifts beneath the appearance of madness while embracing voluntary humiliation.

By tradition he spent his life in the streets half-naked, sleeping wherever night overtook him and refusing the shelter of a house. He bore hunger, cold, mocking, and insults, and ordinarily made himself understood only by signs, keeping silence with everyone except his spiritual father, with whom he conversed normally as a man in full possession of his faculties. The sources relate that the Lord glorified him with the gift of clairvoyance and prophecy.

The synaxarion recounts that when he visited the sick he gave silent signs of their outcome, setting fire to the beds of those who were to recover and wrapping in their own sheets those who were to die. Having foretold his own death, he reposed in peace at the age of forty-nine in the year 1627.