“The Liturgy of St. Tikhon” is the name given, understandably but unfortunately, and inaccurately, to a version of a Western Catholic Mass rite used by Western-Rite Orthodox congregations of a largely Anglican background. It has no real connection with the hierarch after whom it is named — St. Tikhon of Moscow (1865-1925), who, born as Vasilii Ivanovich Belavin, the son of a Russian parish priest, was tonsured as a monk (Tikhon) and ordained in 1891, consecrated a bishop in 1897, served as Orthodox Bishop of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska (whose see he moved in 1905 from San Francisco to New York and had his title changed to Bishop of North America) from 1898 to 1907, subsequently returning to Russia where, after the restoration of the Patriarchate of Moscow (in abeyance since 1721) in 1917, he was elected Patriarch - and thereafter harassed and imprisoned by Russia’s Communist rulers, dying in prison in 1925, and canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1989. Rather (as we shall see) it was “compiled” around 1977 with some degree of deference to a critique of the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer of 1892 by a committee appointed by the Russian Orthodox Church’s “Holy Governing Synod” (the body that exercised governing authority over that church during the abeyance of its patriarch ate between 1721 and 1917) in 1904, in response to an inquiry from the then Bishop Tikhon concerning the possibility of authorizing the use of that Prayer Book for any Episcopalian parishes that should “with its minister” leave the Episcopal Church for Orthodoxy...Complete article here.
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