The church is dedicated to Mary Magdalene, the disciple of Jesus, the Apostle of the Apostles. According to the sixteenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, Mary Magdalene was the first to see Christ after his resurrection (Mark 16:9). She is usually considered a crucial and important disciple of Jesus, along with Mary of Bethany, whom some believe to have been the same woman.[2]
In 1982, the New-York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which was at the time administratively independent of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, canonised the new martyrs of the communist revolution and in May the bodies of Elizabeth and Barbara (Varvara) were moved from the crypt, where only private veneration was possible, to the upper church of St. Mary Magdalene. Since 1981, Elizabeth and Barbara are venerated as "new martyrs" by the Orthodox Church in Exile at St. Mary Magdalene, Gethsemane. A statue of Elizabeth is among those of the 20th-century martyrs above the West Door of Westminster Abbey installed in 1998. In the changed political situation of the 1990s, the Moscow Patriarchate considered recognition of the martyrs of this period including the members of the royal family and her status as a saint was also recognized in April 1992 by the Moscow Patriarchate.[4]
^Jansen, Katherine Ludwig (2000). The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages. Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0691058504.
^Teresa Joan White, "History of Women in the Diaconate: Phoebe, Olympias, Radegund and Colleagues, London, 2014, chapter 16a. {Copy at Lambeth Palace Library]
