Saint Dimiry Klepinin

Dimitri Andreyevich Klepinin, or Saint Dimitri of Paris (Russian: Димитрий Андреевич Клепинин), was a Russian Orthodox priest, a stateless resistance fighter in occupied Paris, who died for France, and is recognized as a martyr and saint. The son of Russian émigrés who fled the civil war, he was influenced by the ecumenical renewal proposed by the personalism of Berdyaev within the Orthodox Youth Movement. He was educated at the Saint Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris and, following the example of evangelical YMCAs, committed himself in 1930 to social work among laborers and the homeless. During the Second World War, he was involved in assisting prisoners at the Compiègne camp; he was subsequently interned there for nine months for helping to hide children of "Jewish race" and distributing false baptismal certificates to their parents. He was deported to Buchenwald in mid-December 1943 and died in Dora twenty-five days later. Named Righteous Among the Nations on July 16, 1985, he was canonized on January 16, 2004, alongside his superior, Mother Maria, her son the reader George Skobtsov, and Ilya Fondaminsky. These four martyrs, together with the Righteous Alexis Medvedkov, a priest in Ugine, are the first five saints of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe.