Twentieth-Century Fragmentation: How One Diocese Became Many Jurisdictions

The Russian Revolution of 1917 severed American Orthodoxy from its Mother Church and its funding, and the single multi-ethnic diocese St. Tikhon had built dissolved into a patchwork of overlapping ethnic jurisdictions. This file traces that fragmentation: the collapse of Russian support, the three-way Russian division of the 1920s–40s, the founding of the Greek Archdiocese and a dozen national jurisdictions, the Cold War’s distorting pressures, and the canonical anomaly of multiple bishops in one city — a situation directly contrary to the ancient canon of one bishop per locality.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (North American context)

The Collapse of the Russian Mission (1917–1924)

Until 1917 the Orthodox in North America were, at least nominally, a single diocese of the Church of Russia, governed from New York and subsidized from St. Petersburg (see The Immigrant Era). The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 destroyed this arrangement at a stroke. The Russian Church was plunged into persecution; the imperial subsidies that had financed missions, parishes, schools, and clergy salaries in America vanished; and communication with the Patriarchate — itself soon under Soviet pressure and, after 1925, without a functioning patriarch — became erratic and then dangerous (J. Erickson, Orthodox Christians in America, Oxford, 1999, ch. 4; M. Stokoe and L. Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, ch. 4).

Deprived of money and oversight, the American diocese — now commonly called the Metropolia — fell into administrative crisis and financial collapse. At the same time, the various ethnic communities that Tikhon had hoped to unite under national auxiliary bishops increasingly looked to their own Mother Churches in the old countries for episcopal leadership. The unitary structure unraveled from two directions at once: the Russian center weakened, and the ethnic peripheries asserted independence.

The Greek Archdiocese and the Constantinopolitan Claim (1921–1922)

The Greek community illustrates the pattern. Greek parishes in America had, before 1908, been served loosely under the Ecumenical Patriarchate; in 1908 Constantinople transferred pastoral oversight of the Greek churches in America to the Church of Greece (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America [GOARCH], “About”; OrthodoxWiki, “Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America,” as locators). The arrangement produced little central organization, and the bitter National Schism in Greece between royalists and Venizelists spilled into American parish life.

Order came through Meletios (Metaxakis). As Metropolitan of Athens he visited the United States in 1918 to begin organizing the Greek parishes; a clergy gathering in New York in 1921 resolved to establish the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America and elected Alexandros (Demoglou) as first archbishop; and the body was incorporated under New York law in 1921 and recognized by the State in 1922 (GOARCH, “About”; “The History of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America,” The National Herald, as locator). Meanwhile Meletios himself was elected Ecumenical Patriarch (as Meletios IV), and in 1922 he reclaimed jurisdiction over Orthodoxy in America for Constantinople, formally recognizing the Archdiocese under his own throne (Erickson, ch. 4; T. FitzGerald, The Orthodox Church, Praeger, 1995, ch. 4). The Greek Archdiocese thus emerged as a second major jurisdiction on the same territory as the Russian Metropolia (see The Greek Archdiocese).

The Detroit Sobor and Temporary Self-Governance (1924)

The Russian Metropolia, cut off from Moscow, sought a canonical basis for governing itself. It found one in Ukaz No. 362 of November 1920 — a decree of Patriarch Tikhon, the Holy Synod, and the Supreme Church Council in Russia authorizing dioceses cut off from the central church authority to organize themselves temporarily and govern autonomously until normal contact could be restored, “subject to confirmation later to the Central Church Authority when it is reestablished” (Erickson, ch. 4; A. Psarev, “Detroit 1924: Crisis, Authority, and the Shape of the OCA,” as locator).

On the basis of Ukaz 362, the Fourth All-American Sobor, meeting in Detroit in 1924, declared the diocese a “temporarily self-governing Church,” to be governed by its elected archbishop together with a council of bishops and periodic councils of clergy and laity (OCA, “All-American Councils”; OrthodoxWiki, “All-American Sobor,” as locators). This declaration of temporary self-governance — invoking explicitly the impossibility of normal communion with a captive Mother Church — is the foundational act of what would become the Orthodox Church in America (see The Orthodox Church in America). It was always framed as temporary; the question of when, and to whom, the Metropolia would render account would dominate the next half-century.

The Three-Way Russian Division (1926–1946)

Among the Russians themselves, the absence of a free central authority produced a three-way fracture. Three distinct bodies claimed to represent legitimate Russian Orthodoxy in America:

The American Metropolia — the self-governing body declared at Detroit in 1924, led by Metropolitan Platon (Rozhdestvensky).
The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) — the émigré synod organized at Sremski Karlovci in Serbia, which claimed authority over all Russian Orthodox abroad (see Formation and Karlovci).
The Moscow Patriarchal Exarchate — parishes remaining under direct Moscow obedience.

The break with ROCOR came in 1926: at a synod in Karlovci the émigré bishops asked Platon to renounce the “temporary self-government” declared at Detroit; on his refusal, the synod condemned the Detroit Sobor, and Platon’s own American council of 1927 in turn declared ROCOR “uncanonical” (OrthodoxWiki, “ROCOR and OCA”; ROCOR Studies materials, as locators; see ROCOR–OCA Relations).

The break with Moscow came in 1933–1934: Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), the locum tenens in Moscow, demanded a pledge of loyalty to the Soviet state; Platon refused; Moscow deposed him and established its own Exarchate under Bishop Benjamin (Fedchenkov) as the body it regarded as the canonical Russian jurisdiction in America (OrthodoxWiki, “ROCOR and OCA,” as locator; Erickson, ch. 4). A temporary rapprochement between the Metropolia and ROCOR was negotiated in 1934–1935, under which the Metropolia retained autonomy while acknowledging ROCOR in matters of faith — but it did not hold.

The decisive rupture came at the Seventh All-American Sobor in Cleveland, November 26–29, 1946. The Cleveland Sobor declared the 1935 arrangement with ROCOR at an end and resolved to seek a renewed relationship with the Mother Church in Moscow while preserving the Metropolia’s full autonomy (OCA, “The 7th All-American Sobor”; “Seventh All-American Sobor in Cleveland,” ROCOR Studies, as locators). The result was not reunion but a hardening of the three-way separation: Metropolia, ROCOR, and Moscow Exarchate remained administratively distinct, each with its own bishops and parishes on the same soil. [Disputed: ROCOR and OCA historiographies characterize the responsibility for the 1946 break differently — ROCOR sources emphasize the Metropolia’s overture to Soviet-controlled Moscow as a betrayal of the 1935 agreement, while OCA/Metropolia sources stress ROCOR’s refusal to grant genuine administrative autonomy.]

The Multiplication of Ethnic Jurisdictions

The Russian three-way split was only the most visible instance of a general pattern. As each immigrant community matured and looked to its ancestral Mother Church for bishops, the territory of North America came to be carpeted with parallel national jurisdictions:

Serbian: the Patriarchate of Belgrade established a Serbian diocese for the United States and Canada in 1921 (see at Chicago), with Bishop Nikolai (Velimirović) as first administrator and Mardarije (Uskoković) as first resident bishop in 1927 (OCA, “Orthodoxy in America, Part Two: Other Orthodox Jurisdictions,” as locator).
Romanian: a Romanian congress at Detroit in 1929 organized a missionary episcopate, formally established by the Patriarchate of Romania in 1929–1930, with Bishop Polycarp (Morusca) consecrated in 1935 (OCA, “Other Orthodox Jurisdictions,” as locator).
Carpatho-Russian (ACROD): in 1938 some 37 Greek Catholic Carpatho-Rusyn parishes under Fr. Orestes Chornock, having renounced the Unia in protest against Latinization, were received by the Ecumenical Patriarchate; Chornock was consecrated bishop on September 18, 1938, and the diocese canonically erected the next day under Patriarchal decree — the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese (American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese [ACROD], “History”; Wikipedia, “American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese,” as locators). This was a second, twentieth-century wave of the same Rusyn return that St. Alexis Toth had begun in 1891.
Bulgarian, Albanian, and Ukrainian communities likewise organized under various authorities (Constantinople, their home patriarchates, or as émigré bodies) across the 1920s–1930s.
Antiochian: St. Raphael’s Syro-Arab mission, after his death in 1915, split between rival archdioceses — broadly, those aligned with Antioch and those with the Russian Metropolia. The two bodies, centered on New York and Toledo, were finally reunited under the Patriarchate of Antioch on June 24, 1975, when Metropolitan Philip (Saliba) and Metropolitan Michael (Shaheen) signed Articles of Reunification, creating the single self-ruled Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America (Wikipedia, “Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese,” as locator; see The Antiochian Archdiocese).

By mid-century there were, on the same continent and frequently in the same cities, a dozen or more Orthodox jurisdictions answering to different Mother Churches.

Cold War Dynamics

The Cold War froze and politicized these divisions. Any tie to the Moscow Patriarchate became suspect as a tie to the Soviet state, which exercised real control over the Russian Church’s external affairs. ROCOR positioned itself as the uncompromised, anti-Soviet “free Russian Church,” while the Metropolia’s wary distance from Moscow was both an ecclesiastical and a political stance. The Moscow Exarchate, by contrast, was widely viewed as compromised by Soviet influence. These suspicions hardened jurisdictional walls and made reunion appear not merely a canonical but a political act — a dynamic that persisted until the Metropolia received autocephaly from Moscow in 1970 as the Orthodox Church in America (see Tomos of Autocephaly), a grant ROCOR and several other Churches did not recognize.

The Canonical Anomaly of Overlapping Jurisdictions

The resulting situation — multiple Orthodox bishops, each fully Orthodox and in communion with the others (with some exceptions), governing parallel flocks in the same city — directly contradicts the ancient canonical order of the Church. The principle of one bishop per city is rooted in the eighth canon of the First Ecumenical Council (Nicaea, 325), which, in regulating the reception of returning Cathar clergy, lays down the governing rule “that there may not be two bishops in the city” (Council of Nicaea, 325, Canon 8; NPNF II/14; The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. Cummings). The canonical norm is territorial: one Eucharistic community, one bishop, one city.

Orthodox ecclesiology has never resolved the diaspora situation in principle, even where it has tolerated it in practice. The various jurisdictions came to coordinate through the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas (SCOBA, 1960) and later the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops, and successive efforts — most notably the Ligonier meeting of 1994 — sought to move toward a single territorial American Church (see The Ligonier Meeting; Overlapping Jurisdictions). The fragmentation of the twentieth century is thus precisely the inversion of St. Tikhon’s 1905 vision of a unified, self-governing, multi-ethnic American Orthodoxy: history delivered the multi-ethnicity but withheld the unity.

References

Erickson, John H. Orthodox Christians in America: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Stokoe, Mark, and Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994. Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995.
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.
Council of Nicaea (325), Canon 8. In The Seven Ecumenical Councils (NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14); and The Rudder (Pedalion), trans. D. Cummings.
Orthodox Church in America. “The 5th All-American Sobor”; “The 7th All-American Sobor”; “Orthodoxy in America, Part Two: Other Orthodox Jurisdictions.” oca.org — used as locators.
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. “About the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.” goarch.org — used as locator.
American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese. “Diocesan Mission and History.” acrod.org — used as locator.
OrthodoxWiki and Orthodox History (orthodoxhistory.org) entries — “All-American Sobor,” “ROCOR and OCA,” “Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America,” “Detroit 1924” (Psarev), “Seventh All-American Sobor in Cleveland” (ROCOR Studies) — used as locators only.
Wikipedia, “Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America” and “American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese” — used as locators only.