Head of the Syro-Arab Mission

As head of the Syro-Arab Mission under the Russian archdiocese, Raphael turned a scattered immigrant population into a Church: he built St. Nicholas parish in Brooklyn as its center, ordained and placed priests, made repeated continental journeys through dozens of cities, provided for the community’s dead, and produced its first service books. This was the decade of hard pastoral labor that made his 1904 episcopate possible.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab-American diaspora)

Building St. Nicholas, Brooklyn

The little St. Nicholas chapel in lower Manhattan (see Call to the Syrian Mission (1895)) was soon outgrown, and Raphael set about giving the Arab community of the New York area a proper church. In 1902 the mission purchased a church building on Pacific Street in Brooklyn, which Raphael dedicated to St. Nicholas and which was consecrated by the Russian Bishop Tikhon — the future patriarch, then ruling hierarch of the American diocese (Orthodox Church in America, “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn,” Lives of the Saints, oca.org). St. Nicholas, Brooklyn, became the mother church and headquarters of the Syro-Arab Mission and, in time, the seat of Raphael’s episcopate; it remains to this day the primatial cathedral of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America — a living monument to his labor (OrthodoxWiki, “Raphael of Brooklyn,” on St. Nicholas as the present primatial cathedral of the Antiochian Archdiocese). Around this center the whole American Arab Orthodox community was organized.

Priests, Parishes, and the Growth of the Mission

Raphael understood that a scattered people could not be held to the Church by one man’s travels alone; they needed resident priests and organized parishes. A central labor of his mission, accordingly, was the recruiting, ordaining, and placing of clergy — settling priests in the communities where Arab immigrants had gathered, so that the sacraments would be available to them week by week and not only on a bishop’s passing visit (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). Under his leadership the number of Arab Orthodox parishes multiplied across the continent, from a handful of struggling gatherings into an organized network of communities — the foundation of what would become, at his death, a diocese of some thirty parishes serving on the order of twenty-five thousand faithful (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; see Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep).

The Continental Journeys

The most striking feature of Raphael’s mission was his tireless travel. Because his flock was strewn across the whole of North America, he went repeatedly to seek it out, undertaking long and arduous pastoral journeys through dozens of cities and towns at a time. The Life records a succession of these tours: the first in the summer of 1896 through some thirty cities from New York to San Francisco; a second in 1898; and, after he received permission in March 1899, a seven-month journey through forty-three cities to minister to the faithful and to raise funds (including for a cemetery) (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). These were not ceremonial visitations but the substance of the mission: in town after town Raphael would find the isolated Arab Orthodox families, celebrate the liturgy and the sacraments among them, baptize their children, bless their marriages, bury their dead, and organize them into communities that might sustain a parish. The sheer physical labor of this travel, across a continent and in an age before easy transport, is one of the marks of his pastoral heroism that the tradition rightly emphasizes.

Providing for the Community’s Life and Death

Raphael’s care extended to the whole life of his people, including its end. Recognizing that his immigrant flock had no consecrated ground of its own in which to bury their dead — a real hardship and indignity for a Christian community — he took steps to provide it, and in August 1901 the mission purchased a section of the Mt. Olivet cemetery on Long Island to serve as an Orthodox burial ground for the Syrian community (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The provision of a cemetery is a small detail with a large meaning: it shows a pastor thinking of his people not merely as souls to be served on Sundays but as a community with all the needs of a settled people — a place to be born into the Church, to be married, and to be buried from it. He was building not just a mission but a home.

The First Service Books

Raphael’s scholarly formation made him uniquely able to give his people what they most lacked: the services of the Church in a form they could use. In 1898 he published The Book of True Consolation in the Divine Prayers, an Arabic service book for the use of the diaspora — one of the first fruits of the liturgical and publishing labor that would culminate in his episcopate (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; treated in full in The 1904 Syrian Orthodox Liturgical Work). That the head of a poor immigrant mission, amid all the labor of travel and parish-founding, also found the time and learning to produce service books is a measure of how completely his scholarship served his pastorate.

Honored, and Choosing to Stay

Raphael’s success made him a figure of note in the wider Antiochian world, and he was more than once considered for elevation to sees back home. In December 1901 he was elected Bishop of Zahleh in the Patriarchate of Antioch — an honor that would have returned him to Syria as a diocesan bishop — but he declined it, unwilling to abandon the American mission he had built and the people who depended on him (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The refusal is characteristic and revealing: offered a bishopric in the homeland, the Arab archimandrite chose instead to remain the shepherd of the Arab diaspora. His flock was now in America, and he would not leave it — a resolve he would voice again and keep to his death (see The Antiochian Arab Cause; Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep).

The Decade That Made the Bishop

By 1903 the fruits of eight years’ labor were plain: a mother church in Brooklyn, a network of parishes and priests across the continent, a cemetery, service books, and a people who had become a Church. It was on the strength of this achievement that the Russian Holy Synod would elect him Bishop of Brooklyn, and it is why his consecration in 1904 was not the beginning of his work but its recognition and crown (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; see First Orthodox Bishop Consecrated in America (1904)). The mission had made the man a bishop before the Church did.

See Also

• Call to the Syrian Mission (1895) — the beginning of the mission
• First Orthodox Bishop Consecrated in America (1904) — the episcopate this labor earned
• Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep — the continental pastorate continued as bishop
• The 1904 Syrian Orthodox Liturgical Work — his Arabic service books
• Antiochian Archdiocese — the jurisdiction whose primatial cathedral, St. Nicholas Brooklyn, he built

References

• Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn.” Lives of the Saints. oca.org. (The 1898 Arabic service book; the pastoral tours of 1896, 1898, and the 1899 seven-month journey through forty-three cities; the August 1901 purchase of the Mt. Olivet cemetery section; the 1902 purchase and consecration by Bishop Tikhon of the Pacific Street church in Brooklyn as St. Nicholas; the December 1901 election as Bishop of Zahleh, declined; the ordaining and placing of priests; the growth to thirty parishes and c. 25,000 faithful.)
• OrthodoxWiki. “Raphael of Brooklyn.” orthodoxwiki.org. (St. Nicholas, Brooklyn, as the present primatial cathedral of the Antiochian Archdiocese; used to locate, per METHODOLOGY not a terminal citation.)
• Tarasar, Constance J., ed. Orthodox America 1794–1976. Syosset, NY: OCA, 1975. (The organization of the immigrant communities under the Russian mission.)