A passion-bearer is a saint who faces death in a Christ-like manner, accepting suffering without resistance and meeting violence with forgiveness. They’re not killed for refusing to renounance their faith. That’s what makes them different from martyrs.
The distinction matters. A martyr dies specifically because he won’t deny Christ. Think of St. Ignatius thrown to the lions, or the forty martyrs freezing in the lake at Sebaste. They’re killed for confessing the faith. But a passion-bearer dies for other reasons, political intrigue, family rivalry, someone’s greed or ambition, and meets that death with the same humility and forgiveness Christ showed on the Cross.
The most famous passion-bearers are Saints Boris and Gleb, brothers who were princes in eleventh-century Rus’. When their father St. Vladimir died in 1015, their older brother Sviatopolk decided to seize power by murdering anyone who might challenge him. Boris learned about the plot against his life. He had an army with him. He could’ve fought back, could’ve marched on Kiev and taken the throne himself. Instead, he dismissed his troops and waited, praying and chanting psalms. When the assassins came, he forgave his brother and asked God to receive his soul.
Gleb met the same fate shortly after. He didn’t resist either. Both brothers chose to die rather than plunge their country into civil war.
That’s the heart of what it means to be a passion-bearer. It’s not passivity or weakness. It’s active love for enemies, the kind Christ commanded and demonstrated. Boris and Gleb could’ve defended themselves. They chose not to. They took up their cross daily, as Christ told His disciples to do, and they followed Him all the way to death.
The Church honors them not because they were victims but because they were victors. They conquered hatred with love. They extinguished violence with gentleness. In what looked like defeat, they participated in Christ’s own victory over death and sin.
We see this category of saint most often in Russian Orthodox tradition, though the theology behind it is universal. The Royal Family, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their five children, were glorified as passion-bearers after they were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. They weren’t killed for being Orthodox. Plenty of Orthodox Christians lived through the Revolution. They were killed for political reasons, because of who they were in the old order. But they met their deaths with prayer and forgiveness, holding to their faith with piety and true love for God even when it didn’t save them from the firing squad.
That’s what passion-bearing reveals about our faith. We don’t believe suffering is good in itself. We’re not masochists. But we do believe that when suffering comes, and it does come, whether from persecution or from the ordinary cruelty people inflict on each other, we can meet it in a way that transforms it. We can bear it as Christ bore His passion, which is where the term comes from. The Passion of Christ isn’t just His death. It’s His willing acceptance of suffering for love of us.
When you hear about a passion-bearer, you’re hearing about someone who lived that out completely. Someone who had the chance to fight back, to defend himself, to return evil for evil, and chose instead to pray for his killers. That’s not natural. It’s supernatural. It’s what we’re all called to, in smaller ways, when someone wrongs us at work or in the family or here in Beaumont where everybody knows everybody and grudges can last generations.
The feast of Boris and Gleb is July 24. If you want to understand this category of saint better, read their story that day. You’ll find it on oca.org in the lives of saints. It’s not long. But it shows you what the Gospel looks like when someone takes it seriously enough to die for it, even when they’re not being asked to deny Christ. They’re just being asked to hate their brother. And they won’t.
