Born in Exile (1860)

Raphael Hawaweeny was born in Beirut in 1860 to an Orthodox family of Damascus that had fled the anti-Christian massacres of that summer, in which their own parish priest, St. Joseph of Damascus, was among the martyred. The child was named for the Archangel Raphael, and his life began, as the tradition emphasizes, in exile — a foreshadowing of the diaspora he would one day shepherd.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab-American diaspora)

The Year 1860 in Syria

The world into which Raphael Hawaweeny was born was one of catastrophe for the Christians of Ottoman Syria. In the summer of 1860, intercommunal violence that had begun as a conflict between Druze and Maronites in Mount Lebanon spread to Damascus, where in July a mob attacked the Christian quarter; thousands of Christians were killed over several days before order was restored, in an event that became a byword for the vulnerability of the Ottoman Christian communities in the nineteenth century (a well-documented episode of Ottoman history; for its impact on the Antiochian Orthodox community and the Hawaweeny family, see Orthodox Church in America, “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn,” Lives of the Saints, oca.org). Among the Orthodox clergy martyred in the Damascus massacre was the parish priest St. Joseph of Damascus, later himself glorified, whose death the Hawaweeny family’s tradition remembers as touching their own parish (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; on St. Joseph of Damascus as a martyr of 1860, Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese, The Life of Our Father among the Saints Raphael Hawaweeny).

It was against this background of flight and bereavement that the future bishop was born. His parents — Michael Hawaweeny and his wife Mariam, a daughter of a Damascus priest — had fled the city for the greater safety of Beirut, and it was there, in exile from their own Damascus, that their son was born (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The devotional tradition draws the obvious lesson: the man who would spend his life gathering a scattered people began his own life as a refugee, born outside the city of his family, and thus, in a phrase that recurs in his veneration, was “born in exile.”

Birth, Name, and Date

The child was named Raphael, after the Archangel Raphael, “God has healed,” one of the holy Archangels whose synaxis the Church keeps on 8 November (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The naming is more than incidental in the tradition: the boy given an archangel’s name at his birth in exile is presented as marked from the first for a ministry of gathering and healing.

The date of his birth is given with some variation in the sources, and the collection reports the divergence rather than collapsing it.

[Disputed: St. Raphael’s birthdate. The most circumstantial accounts give 8 November 1860 (Julian calendar), the feast of the Synaxis of the Archangels, after whom he was named — corresponding to 20 November 1860 on the civil (Gregorian) calendar, the form given in some references (so, respectively, the devotional tradition following the Archangels’ feast, e.g. OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; and OrthodoxWiki, “Raphael of Brooklyn,” giving “20 November 1860”). Other careful accounts note that the exact day is not securely documented and give only the year 1860 with the date estimated near the Archangels’ feast (so the Antiochian Archdiocese Life). The year 1860 is not in dispute; the day is reported here as the traditional 8/20 November, with the caveat that it rests on the association with his name-feast rather than on a birth record.]

The place of birth — Beirut, not Damascus — is likewise fixed by the fact of the family’s flight, and the sources are consistent that he was born in Beirut of a Damascene family, even where popular retellings loosely call him “of Damascus” for his ancestry and later formation there (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; OrthodoxWiki, “Raphael of Brooklyn,” describing “Damascene Syrian refugee parents”). The distinction matters for the tradition’s own emphasis: he was a son of Damascus born in exile from it.

The Hawaweeny Family

The Hawaweeny were an Orthodox family of Damascus, of the Arabic-speaking (Rūm Orthodox) community that had lived under the Patriarchate of Antioch for centuries. Raphael’s father, Michael, is remembered simply as a devout layman of that community; his mother, Mariam, was the daughter of a priest, which placed the boy within the clerical culture of the Church from birth (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The family soon returned to Damascus once the danger had passed, and it was there that Raphael was raised and received his first schooling — so that although he was born in Beirut, Damascus was the city of his upbringing and his formation, the city whose ecclesiastical struggles would shape his convictions (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; see Formation in Damascus and the Arab Awakening).

The tradition preserves little of the private detail of these childhood years — the sources for Raphael’s life become full only when he enters the Patriarchate’s schools and public service (see The Sources for His Life). What it fixes securely is the shape of the beginning: a Damascene child of the Church, named for an archangel, born in the shadow of the 1860 martyrdoms into a community that knew both the antiquity of its faith and the precariousness of its place.

The Meaning the Tradition Draws

Hagiography reads beginnings for their sense, and the veneration of St. Raphael has consistently read his birth-in-exile as a prefiguring of his vocation. The people he would gather in America were, like his own family in 1860, a displaced people — Arab Christians torn from Damascus and Beirut and Aleppo by poverty and upheaval and scattered across a continent — and the bishop who gathered them had himself been born among refugees (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; Antiochian Archdiocese, Life). Per the repository methodology, this is offered as the tradition’s interpretation of his life rather than as a documented statement of the infant’s destiny; but the historical facts on which it rests — the massacres, the flight, the Beirut birth, the Damascene family — are secure, and it is on secure ground that the tradition builds its meaning.

See Also

• Formation in Damascus and the Arab Awakening — the Damascus of his upbringing and its ecclesiastical struggles
• The Antiochian Arab Cause — the Arab-versus-Greek struggle that grew from this world
• Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep — the scattered people he would gather, prefigured in his own exile
• The Sources for His Life — why the record is thin for these earliest years

References

• Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn.” Lives of the Saints. oca.org. (The canonical Life: birth in Beirut in 1860 to the Damascene family of Michael and Mariam Hawaweeny; the 1860 massacres and the martyrdom of St. Joseph of Damascus; the naming after the Archangel Raphael; the upbringing in Damascus.)
• OrthodoxWiki. “Raphael of Brooklyn.” orthodoxwiki.org. (Birth “20 November 1860, in Beirut,” to “Damascene Syrian refugee parents” — used to locate the Gregorian-date form; per METHODOLOGY not a terminal citation.)
• Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. The Life of Our Father among the Saints Raphael Hawaweeny. (The Antiochian biographical tradition; the martyrdom of St. Joseph of Damascus; the uncertainty of the exact birth-day.)
• On the July 1860 Damascus massacre and the wider 1860 civil conflict in Ottoman Syria and Mount Lebanon: a well-documented episode of nineteenth-century Ottoman history, here drawn from the accounts in the Life as they bear on the Hawaweeny family.