The Immigrant Era: Orthodoxy in the Continental United States, 1860s–1917

From a single Russian-supported parish in Gold Rush San Francisco to a multi-ethnic diocese stretching across the continent, the half-century before 1917 transformed Orthodoxy in America. This file traces the diocesan see’s migration from Sitka to the Atlantic seaboard, the mass return of Eastern Catholic (Uniate) Rusyns under St. Alexis Toth, the Syro-Arab mission of St. Raphael of Brooklyn, and St. Tikhon’s vision of a self-governing American Church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (North American context)

From Alaska to the Lower 48

Orthodoxy in North America began as a Russian mission in Alaska in 1794 (see The Alaska Mission). Its expansion into the continental United States followed the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867 and the migration of population and commerce southward. Orthodox faithful of various nationalities — drawn by the California Gold Rush — had begun gathering in San Francisco in the late 1850s, and a Russian-supported parish took shape there in the 1860s (Orthodox Church in America [OCA], “150th Anniversary of the Establishment of the North American Diocesan See in San Francisco”; D. Stokoe and L. Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, ch. 2).

The administrative center of the Church followed the demographic shift. In 1870 the Holy Synod of the Church of Russia partitioned the vast Kamchatka diocese, creating the Diocese of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, with North America assigned to it as a single eparchy. By the Synod’s order the diocesan chancery (Spiritual Consistory) was placed in San Francisco while the episcopal see remained at Sitka; in 1872 Bishop John (Mitropolsky) formally transferred the see itself to San Francisco (OrthodoxWiki, “John (Mitropolsky) of the Aleutians,” as locator; OCA, “150th Anniversary”; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 2). The diocese was renamed “Aleutian Islands and North America” in 1900, reflecting its expanding scope beyond Alaska.

The final move came under St. Tikhon: in 1905 the see was transferred from San Francisco to New York City, closer to the centers of immigration and of Uniate conversions in the industrial Northeast (OCA, “150th Anniversary”; J. Erickson, Orthodox Christians in America, Oxford, 1999, ch. 3). This eastward migration of the see — Sitka to San Francisco to New York within a single generation — physically charts the demographic transformation of American Orthodoxy from a Pacific mission to an Atlantic immigrant Church.

St. Alexis Toth and the Return of the Rusyns (1891–)

The largest single source of growth in this period was not Russian immigration but the return to Orthodoxy of Eastern Catholic (Greek Catholic, or “Uniate”) Carpatho-Rusyns and Galicians who had emigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the mining and mill towns of Pennsylvania and the upper Midwest.

The catalyst was St. Alexis Toth (1854–1909), a widowed Greek Catholic priest from the Prešov region who arrived in Minneapolis in November 1889 to serve a new Greek Catholic parish. Following canonical custom, he presented his credentials to the local Roman Catholic ordinary, Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Ireland — a leading figure in the “Americanist” effort to Latinize and assimilate immigrant Catholics — refused to recognize a married Eastern-rite clergyman (Toth was in fact a widower) and forbade his parishioners to receive his ministrations (A. Toth, autobiographical accounts collected in Orthodox America 1794–1976, ed. C. Tarasar; Erickson, ch. 2; “Alexis Toth,” Wikipedia, as locator).

Rejected by Rome’s American hierarchy, Toth traveled to San Francisco, where on March 25, 1891, Bishop Vladimir (Sokolovsky) received Toth and 361 parishioners of St. Mary’s, Minneapolis, into the Orthodox Church (OCA, “Saint Alexis Toth and the Return to Orthodoxy of the Uniates in North America”). This reception became the seed of a movement. Over the following decades, parish after parish of disaffected Greek Catholics — alienated by Latinization, the ban on married clergy, and the hostility of an Irish- and German-dominated Roman hierarchy — returned to the Orthodox communion.

The totals are documented as ranges rather than fixed figures. [Disputed: hagiographical and diocesan summaries credit Toth’s direct labors with “over 17 parishes” and roughly 20,000–29,000 returnees (OCA, “Saint Alexis Toth”; ACROD, “St. Alexis Toth”), while the broader movement he inspired is variously estimated to have brought tens of thousands — up to “nearly 50,000” Uniates by some accounts — into Orthodoxy by the early twentieth century (Wikipedia, “Alexis Toth,” as locator; cf. Erickson, ch. 2, who treats the larger figures with caution).] Scholarship distinguishes converts attributable directly to Toth from those of the wider phenomenon, and exact numbers remain imprecise.

Toth reposed on May 7, 1909, and was glorified by the Orthodox Church in America as St. Alexis of Wilkes-Barre on May 29, 1994, during the bicentennial of Orthodoxy in North America (OCA, “Repose of Saint Alexis Toth, Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in America”). The Rusyn return permanently shaped the ethnic and demographic profile of American Orthodoxy and supplied much of its parish base in the industrial East.

St. Raphael of Brooklyn and the Syro-Arab Mission

The second great immigrant stream was Arabic-speaking — Orthodox Christians from Ottoman Syria (modern Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine) who came in the 1890s and after. To shepherd them, the Russian diocese ordained and elevated St. Raphael Hawaweeny (1860–1915), born Rafla Hawaweeny in Beirut to Damascene refugee parents and educated at Halki and in Russia (OrthodoxWiki, “Raphael of Brooklyn,” as locator; Erickson, ch. 3).

Raphael came to the United States in 1895 to lead the Syro-Arab Orthodox mission, establishing St. Nicholas parish in Brooklyn as its center. On March 13, 1904, he was consecrated Bishop of Brooklyn — the first Orthodox bishop of any nationality to be consecrated on American soil — with the consecration performed in New York by St. Tikhon (then archbishop) together with Bishop Innocent (Pustynsky) (OrthodoxWiki, “Raphael of Brooklyn”; OCA, “Orthodox Christians in North America,” ch. 3). As auxiliary bishop for the Arab parishes, he traveled ceaselessly, establishing some thirty parishes across North America and ministering to a scattered flock, earning the title “Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep in the American Wilderness.”

Raphael reposed on February 27, 1915, and was glorified by the Orthodox Church in America in 2000 (services held at St. Tikhon’s Monastery that May) (OrthodoxWiki, “Raphael of Brooklyn,” as locator). His mission was the institutional ancestor of what would later become the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese (see The Antiochian Archdiocese).

St. Tikhon’s American Years (1898–1907)

The figure who gave coherence and vision to this growing body was St. Tikhon (Bellavin) (1865–1925), entrusted at age 33 with the North American missionary diocese in 1898 and later Patriarch of Moscow. His nine years in America (1898–1907) were the period in which a Russian mission became, in aspiration, an American Church (OCA, “Orthodox Christians in North America,” ch. 3; “Who Was St. Tikhon?”, Orthodox History, as locator).

Tikhon governed a diocese that was already multi-ethnic in fact — Russian, Rusyn, Galician, Serbian, Greek, Syro-Arab, and Alaskan native — and he sought structures to match. He oversaw the consecration of an auxiliary bishop for Alaska (1903) and the consecration of St. Raphael “to administer the Arab parishes” (1904), beginning a pattern of ethnic auxiliary episcopates within a single diocese (OCA, ch. 3; Erickson, ch. 3).

In 1905 he transferred the see to New York and, in a report that same year to the Holy Synod of Russia, proposed a far more fundamental reorganization: that the Russian-supported mission evolve into a self-supporting, multi-ethnic American diocese comprising distinct national auxiliary dioceses — each preserving its own liturgical and parochial “peculiarities in canonical order” — under a single American metropolitan (OCA, ch. 3; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 3; T. FitzGerald, The Orthodox Church, Praeger, 1995, ch. 3). This 1905 plan is widely regarded as the prophetic blueprint for a united, territorial American Orthodox Church — anticipating by decades the debates over jurisdictional unity that would follow.

Tikhon’s tenure also produced enduring institutions of an English-speaking, self-conscious American Orthodoxy:

  • St. Tikhon’s Monastery, South Canaan, Pennsylvania, founded in 1905 — the oldest continuously operating Orthodox monastery in North America. The land was purchased on June 26, 1905, and the grounds dedicated on July 31, 1905, by Bishop Raphael (OrthodoxWiki, “St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Monastery,” and the monastery’s own history, as locators).
  • An Orthodox seminary in Minneapolis (1905), offering instruction in both English and Russian.
  • The Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church (1906), translated by the Episcopalian writer Isabel Florence Hapgood at Tikhon’s request — the first comprehensive English-language Orthodox service book, and a milestone in the liturgical Englishing of American Orthodoxy (OCA, ch. 3; “Isabel Hapgood,” OrthodoxWiki, as locator).

The Mayfield Sobor (1907)

The culmination of Tikhon’s conciliar vision was the First All-American Sobor, held in February 1907 in Mayfield, Pennsylvania, after preparatory clergy conferences in 1905 and 1906. Bringing together clergy and lay delegates from across the diocese, it adopted the name “The Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in America” and gave institutional form — though still under Russian authority — to the principle of conciliar, lay-inclusive governance (OCA, “Orthodox Christians in North America,” ch. 3; “115 Years Ago: the First All-American Sobor,” OCA). Tikhon sailed for his new appointment in Russia the following month.

When Tikhon departed in 1907, American Orthodoxy was a single though internally diverse diocese, growing rapidly, with an emerging native institutional life and a clear vision of becoming a unified American Church. That vision would survive Tikhon’s departure by only a decade. The Russian Revolution of 1917 severed the diocese from its Mother Church and its funding, and the unity Tikhon had labored to build fractured into the patchwork of overlapping ethnic jurisdictions that still characterizes Orthodoxy in America (see Twentieth-Century Fragmentation).

See Also

References

  • Stokoe, Mark, and Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994. Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995.
  • Erickson, John H. Orthodox Christians in America: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Tarasar, Constance J., ed. Orthodox America 1794–1976: Development of the Orthodox Church in America. Syosset, NY: Orthodox Church in America, 1975.
  • FitzGerald, Thomas E. The Orthodox Church. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995.
  • Orthodox Church in America. Orthodox Christians in North America, Chapter 3 (Stokoe and Kishkovsky). oca.org/history-archives — used as locator for primary diocesan records.
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Alexis Toth and the Return to Orthodoxy of the Uniates in North America”; “Repose of Saint Alexis Toth”; “150th Anniversary of the Establishment of the North American Diocesan See in San Francisco.” oca.org — used as locators.
  • American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese. “St. Alexis Toth.” acrod.org — used as locator.
  • OrthodoxWiki entries: “Raphael of Brooklyn,” “John (Mitropolsky) of the Aleutians,” “St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Monastery (South Canaan, Pennsylvania),” “Isabel Hapgood” — used as locators only.
  • Hapgood, Isabel Florence, trans. Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church. 1906.