Call to the Syrian Mission (1895)

The waves of Arab (Syrian) immigration to America in the 1880s and 1890s had produced a large Orthodox community with almost no clergy of its own; in 1895 Raphael was invited to New York to shepherd them under the Russian archdiocese. He arrived on 2 November 1895 and at once began gathering the scattered faithful and founding the mission’s first chapel.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab-American diaspora)

The Flock Without a Shepherd

The later nineteenth century sent tens of thousands of Christians from Ottoman Syria — from Damascus, Beirut, Zahleh, Aleppo, and the villages of Mount Lebanon — across the Atlantic to the cities and industrial towns of North America, driven by poverty, insecurity, and the search for work. Among them were many thousands of Orthodox Christians of the Patriarchate of Antioch, but they came almost entirely without their own clergy, and they found in America no bishop and few priests who spoke their language or knew their rite (Orthodox Church in America, “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn,” Lives of the Saints, oca.org; Constance J. Tarasar, ed., Orthodox America 1794–1976, Syosset, NY: OCA, 1975, on the immigrant communities gathered under the Russian mission). Scattered across a vast continent, unshepherded, they were exactly the “lost sheep” the tradition would later name — an Orthodox people in danger of losing their faith for want of a pastor.

The care of these Arab immigrants fell, in the ecclesiastical arrangement of the day, not to distant Antioch but to the Russian Orthodox mission in North America — the diocese descended from the Alaskan mission of 1794, which by the 1890s had its see on the American mainland and understood itself as the Orthodox Church for all the Orthodox of America, of whatever nationality (Tarasar, Orthodox America 1794–1976, 1975; see The Russian Mission and the Many Nationalities). It was natural, then, that when the Arab community of New York and its priest sought a leader, and when the Russian Church looked for a man to send, the search converged on an Arab archimandrite already in Russian service who was ideally suited to the task.

The Invitation to Raphael

That man was Raphael Hawaweeny, then instructor in Arabic at the Kazan Theological Academy (see Student and Teacher at Halki and Kiev). He was the obvious choice on every count: an Antiochian archimandrite, so a cleric of the immigrants’ own Patriarchate; a native Arabic speaker who could serve them in their own tongue; and, by his years in Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan, a trusted man of the Russian Church that would send and support him. In him the Arab flock and the Russian mission met in a single person (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org).

Raphael was invited to America in 1895 to take charge of the Syrian Orthodox community of New York, under the authority of the Russian archdiocese, and he accepted (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The decision meant leaving the security of an academic post in Russia for the hard and uncertain labor of an immigrant mission in a strange country — a choice consonant with the pastoral seriousness that would mark his whole American career. He would never permanently leave; America became his life’s work and, in the end, the place of his burial.

Arrival and First Labors, November 1895

Raphael arrived in New York on 2 November 1895, and threw himself immediately into the work (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). On 5 November 1895 he assisted the Russian Bishop Nicholas — the ruling hierarch of the American diocese — at the liturgy in the Russian church, publicly taking up his place within the Russian mission he had come to serve (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). His first and most urgent task was to give the Arab community of New York a church of its own: he established a St. Nicholas chapel in lower Manhattan as the first home of the Syrian Orthodox mission, a gathering-place where the scattered faithful could find the liturgy in their own language and rite (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org).

The chapel was only the beginning. Raphael grasped from the first that his flock was not confined to New York but strewn across the whole continent, in industrial towns and mill villages wherever Arab immigrants had found work, and that to shepherd them he would have to go to them. Already in the summer of 1896 he set out on the first of his great pastoral journeys — a tour that reportedly took him to some thirty cities from New York to San Francisco, seeking out isolated Arab Orthodox families, celebrating the sacraments among them, and beginning to knit them into a Church (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The pattern of his American ministry — the tireless continental travel to gather a dispersed people — was set within a year of his arrival, and it is treated in full in the account of his mission (see Head of the Syro-Arab Mission).

The Shape of the Mission from the Start

Three features of Raphael’s mission were present from these first months and would define it. First, it was a mission of gathering: its fundamental work was to find the scattered and unshepherded and to give them the Church — chapels, priests, sacraments, the liturgy in Arabic. Second, it was a mission under the Russian archdiocese: Raphael served, and would be consecrated bishop, within the one multiethnic American diocese, not as the agent of a separate Antiochian jurisdiction (which did not then exist in America) — a fact of the greatest importance for understanding both his unifying role and the fragmentation that followed his death (see The Fragmentation after 1917). Third, it was continental in scope from the outset: Raphael understood his charge as the whole Arab Orthodox people of North America, not one city’s parish, and he traveled accordingly. The 1895 call, in short, set in motion a mission whose character — gathering, Russian-sponsored, continental — would carry through to his death twenty years later.

See Also

• Head of the Syro-Arab Mission — the building of St. Nicholas, Brooklyn, and the labor of the mission
• Student and Teacher at Halki and Kiev — the Russian post from which he was called
• The Russian Mission and the Many Nationalities — the multiethnic diocese under which he served
• Orthodoxy in America: the Immigrant Era — the wider immigrant context of the 1890s
• St. Tikhon of Moscow — the archbishop under whom the mission would flourish

References

• Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn.” Lives of the Saints. oca.org. (The 1895 invitation to America; arrival in New York on 2 November 1895; assisting Bishop Nicholas at the liturgy on 5 November 1895; the founding of the St. Nicholas chapel in lower Manhattan; the first continental pastoral journey in the summer of 1896 through some thirty cities from New York to San Francisco.)
• Tarasar, Constance J., ed. Orthodox America 1794–1976: Development of the Orthodox Church in America. Syosset, NY: Orthodox Church in America, 1975. (The Syrian/Arab immigrant community gathered under the Russian mission; the multiethnic character of the American diocese.)
• Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. The Life of Our Father among the Saints Raphael Hawaweeny. (The condition of the unshepherded Arab immigrants and Raphael’s call to them.)