On 5 November 1917 (OS) he was selected the 11th Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia,[Note 1] after a period of about 200 years of the Synodal rule in the ROC.

While in the United States, Tikhon became aware of the country's tradition of religious diversity, as well as the growing ecumenical and Pan-Slav movements, and the needs of a wide variety of eastern and southern European immigrants.

Before his arrival, in 1890, a delegation of Carpatho-Rusyns also had approached the Russian consul in San Francisco and requested a bishop, since the Latin Catholic archbishop of Minnesota, John Ireland was attempting to force their assimilation, although Byzantine Rite Catholics had previously been accorded certain dispensations from the Roman Rite practices of the Latin Church.

Their Byzantine (Ruthenian) Catholic priest, Alexis Toth, was formally accepted into the Russian Orthodox Church in 1892.

[3] More Byzantine Catholics joined the Eastern Orthodox fold, especially priests after 1907, when Pope Pius X published Ea Semper, restricting their previously recognized right to ordain married men.

In 1905, the title of archbishop was bestowed on him, and he moved his formal residence and diocesan office from San Francisco to New York.

September 4, ] 1905 The Holy Trinity Russian (Greek) Orthodox church was consecrated in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, on the corner of McKenzie Street and Manitoba Avenue by the new archbishop Tikhon, Head of the Russian Orthodox Mission in North America and soon to become Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.

The council's major decision that passed on 28 October 1917, days after the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, was to restore the Patriarchy in the ROC.

Under pressure from the authorities, Tikhon issued several messages to the believers in which he stated in part that he was "no longer an enemy to the Soviet power".

Textual analysis of these messages shows considerable similarity with a number of documents exchanged in the Politburo on the "Tikhon Affair".

In 1923 Tikhon was "deposed" by a Soviet-sponsored[9] council of the so-called Living Church, which decreed that he was "henceforth a simple citizen—Vasily Bellavin."

Tikhon was glorified (canonized) a saint by the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in conjunction with the great glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Soviet Yoke on 1 November [O.S.

23 March] 1992, fifty bishops solemnly transferred them to the Katholikon (main church) of the Donskoy Monastery in a place of honour by the soleas (close to the sanctuary).