The Antiochian Arab Cause

Raphael was a committed partisan of the Arab party’s effort to recover the Patriarchate of Antioch from Greek control, and in 1891 his refusal to commemorate a disputed Greek patriarch led to his suspension by the Antiochian hierarchy. That stand, costly in Antioch, deepened his bond with the sympathetic Russian Church — the bond that would carry him to America.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab-American diaspora)

The Cause

The great ecclesiastical question of Raphael’s Antiochian generation was whether the Arabic-speaking Orthodox — the overwhelming majority of the faithful and the lower clergy of the Patriarchate of Antioch — would recover the effective leadership of their own ancient see from a hierarchy that at its highest levels remained Greek. The nineteenth-century “Arab awakening” had given this old grievance new energy, and by the 1880s and 1890s the contest for the patriarchal throne of Antioch had become the sharpest expression of the Arab-Greek struggle (Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, The Life of Our Father among the Saints Raphael Hawaweeny; on the general struggle see Formation in Damascus and the Arab Awakening).

Raphael, an educated Arab archimandrite formed in this world, was unambiguously of the Arab party. His whole later career — his labor for Arabic liturgical books, his insistence on serving his people in their own language, his pastoral identification with a displaced Arab flock — is of a piece with this early commitment (Orthodox Church in America, “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn,” Lives of the Saints, oca.org). The Arab cause was not for him an abstraction but the defining loyalty of his ecclesiastical life, and it is the thread that runs unbroken from Damascus through Moscow to Brooklyn.

The 1891 Crisis: The Suspension over Patriarch Spyridon

The decisive episode came while Raphael was serving in Russia as head of the Antiochian representation church in Moscow (see Student and Teacher at Halki and Kiev). In this period the patriarchal throne of Antioch was held by Patriarch Spyridon, a Greek whose election the Arab party regarded as illegitimate — as an imposition of the Greek interest against the will of the Arab faithful. When Raphael, from Moscow, was required to commemorate Spyridon liturgically as his patriarch, he refused, and for that refusal he was suspended by the Antiochian authorities around 1891 (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org).

The suspension is the sharpest evidence of Raphael’s convictions: he was willing to incur ecclesiastical discipline rather than lend liturgical recognition to a patriarch he judged to have been imposed against his people. It was, in the terms of the Church, a costly act of conscience — the young archimandrite setting his loyalty to the Arab cause above his own standing. He was later reinstated, the breach healed, but the episode fixed his reputation as a partisan of the Arab party and, crucially, as a man whose Antiochian prospects were now entangled with the politics of the Greek-dominated hierarchy (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org).

[Disputed: the precise circumstances and dating of Raphael’s 1891 suspension. The canonical Life records that Raphael was suspended around 1891 for refusing to commemorate Patriarch Spyridon of Antioch, whose election the Arab party contested, and was subsequently reinstated (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The details of the patriarchal succession disputes of the Church of Antioch in the 1890s are complex and are recounted with some variation in the histories of that Church; this file follows the Life‘s account of Raphael’s own role — a refusal of commemoration on the Arab party’s grounds, followed by suspension and reinstatement — without attempting to adjudicate the wider succession dispute, which lies outside the scope of this collection.]

Why It Turned Him Toward Russia — and America

The 1891 crisis did more than test Raphael’s conscience; it shaped his geography. A learned Arab partisan at odds with the Greek leadership of his own Patriarchate had, in the Russian Church, a natural refuge and patron. Russia sympathized with the Arab party against Greek dominance, welcomed able Antiochian clergy into its academies and its service, and could offer Raphael what Antioch, in the moment of his disgrace, could not: honor, employment, and a scholarly home (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; on the Russian-Arab alignment, the histories of the Church of Antioch and of Russian engagement in the Orthodox East). It was in the years after the suspension that Raphael studied at Kiev and taught Arabic at Kazan, embedding himself ever more deeply in the Russian ecclesiastical world.

This is the indispensable context for understanding how an Arab cleric of Antioch came to be a missionary bishop under the Russian Church in America. He did not arrive in the Russian orbit by accident or mere ambition; he was drawn there by the logic of the Arab cause itself — a cause that made Russia his ally and, when the Arab immigrants of America needed a shepherd, made Raphael the Russian mission’s obvious choice to send. The Arab struggle in Antioch and the Russian mission in America are thus not two separate stories but one: the same loyalty that got him suspended in 1891 got him consecrated in Brooklyn in 1904 (see Call to the Syrian Mission (1895) and First Orthodox Bishop Consecrated in America (1904)).

The Cause Vindicated at Home

Raphael’s own stand was vindicated after he had gone to America. In 1899 the Arab party at last secured the patriarchal throne with the election of Meletios (Doumani), the first of the modern Arab patriarchs of Antioch and the effective end of Greek control of the see — the very outcome for which Raphael’s generation had contended (a landmark of Antiochian history; noted in the Antiochian Archdiocese Life and in the histories of the Church of Antioch). Raphael was by then building St. Nicholas in Brooklyn, half a world away, but the cause he had suffered for in 1891 had triumphed in his own lifetime. That he served this cause not from the patriarchal city but from the immigrant parishes of America is one of the ironies the tradition savors: the Arab bishop who could not, in the end, be spared for a see in Syria — he declined election to Zahleh and was sought for other Antiochian sees — chose to remain the shepherd of the Arab diaspora he had gathered in the New World (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; see Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep).

See Also

• Student and Teacher at Halki and Kiev — the Russian academic world the cause drew him into
• Formation in Damascus and the Arab Awakening — the wider struggle from which this cause grew
• Call to the Syrian Mission (1895) — where the Russian bond carried him
• The 1904 Syrian Orthodox Liturgical Work — the Arabic liturgical labor that continued the cause in America

References

• Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn.” Lives of the Saints. oca.org. (Raphael as head of the Antiochian representation church in Moscow; his suspension around 1891 for refusing to commemorate Patriarch Spyridon, whose election the Arab party disputed, and his reinstatement; his later declining of the see of Zahleh and his choice to remain in America.)
• Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. The Life of Our Father among the Saints Raphael Hawaweeny. (The Arab-Greek struggle in the Patriarchate of Antioch and Raphael’s partisanship of the Arab cause; the 1899 election of Patriarch Meletios Doumani.)
• On the patriarchal succession disputes of the Church of Antioch in the 1890s and the 1899 Arab recovery of the throne under Meletios (Doumani): the general histories of the Church of Antioch, as context for Raphael’s advocacy.