Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep

As Bishop of Brooklyn (1904–1915) Raphael gave his diocese the fullness of a pastor’s care: he crossed and re-crossed the continent to reach a scattered people, grew the mission to some thirty parishes and twenty-five thousand faithful, founded and wrote for the magazine Al-Kalimat / The Word, and shared in the building of St. Tikhon’s Monastery. His title in the Church — “Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep in America” — is the summary of this decade.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab-American diaspora)

The Shepherd Who Went to the Sheep

The image the Church has fixed on Raphael is the Good Shepherd of the Gospel who leaves the flock to seek the one that is lost (Luke 15:4–6; John 10:11–16), and it is exactly apt to his episcopate. His flock was not a settled congregation but a people scattered across a continent — Arab Orthodox families in the mill towns of New England, the industrial cities of the Midwest, the mining and railroad settlements of the West — and Raphael, as bishop no less than as archimandrite, went to them (Orthodox Church in America, “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn,” Lives of the Saints, oca.org). He continued the pattern of long pastoral journeys he had set in the 1890s, traveling incessantly to visit, to ordain and install priests, to consecrate churches, to celebrate the sacraments, and simply to be present as a bishop among a people who might otherwise never see one (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; see Head of the Syro-Arab Mission). The title the Church gave him — “the Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep in America” — is not a pious flourish but a precise description of the work: he found and gathered the lost.

The Diocese He Built

The fruits of this labor were counted at his death and are the plainest measure of it. By 1915 the Syro-Arab mission he had led had grown into a diocese of some thirty parishes serving on the order of twenty-five thousand faithful across North America (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). Where he had begun, twenty years before, with a single small chapel and a handful of unshepherded families, he left an organized Church with churches, clergy, institutions, and a periodical of its own. He had, in the most literal sense, built the American Arab Orthodox Church — a foundation so solid that it survived the fragmentation of the wider American Church after 1917 and grew, through the twentieth century, into the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, whose primatial cathedral is still Raphael’s St. Nicholas in Brooklyn (see Legacy; Antiochian Archdiocese).

Al-Kalimat / The Word

Raphael’s scholarly and pastoral instincts joined in the founding of a magazine to bind his scattered people together. Late in 1904 he announced his intention to publish a periodical, and in January 1905 the first issue of Al-Kalimat (The Word) appeared — an Arabic-language magazine that carried instruction, news, and edification to the Arab Orthodox across the continent, and to which Raphael himself contributed numerous articles (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). In an age before easy travel or communication, such a periodical was a genuine pastoral instrument: it let a bishop who could not be everywhere at once teach and unite a dispersed flock through the printed word, and it gave the community a shared voice and identity. The Word outlived its founder and continues, in English, as the official magazine of the Antiochian Archdiocese — one of the most durable of Raphael’s creations (OrthodoxWiki, “Raphael of Brooklyn,” on The Word as the continuing archdiocesan magazine). His use of the press is treated further as part of his liturgical and publishing labor (see The 1904 Syrian Orthodox Liturgical Work).

A Bishop of the Whole American Church

Though his special charge was the Arab flock, Raphael served as a bishop of the one multiethnic American diocese and shared fully in its common life. In the summer of 1905 he took part in the consecration of the grounds and the blessing of the orphanage at St. Tikhon’s Monastery at South Canaan, Pennsylvania — the first Orthodox monastery in America — an involvement that would, providentially, make St. Tikhon’s the site of his own glorification ninety-five years later (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; see Glorification 2000). He presided at diocesan clergy conferences, including one at Old Forge, Pennsylvania, attended by fellow laborers of the mission who would themselves be numbered among the saints — Fathers Alexis Toth, Alexander Hotovitzky, and John Kochurov (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). His place among these men, gathered under Archbishop Tikhon, is a vivid picture of the sanctity of that pre-revolutionary American Church: a single conference of clergy that would give the calendar several saints at once (see The Russian Mission and the Many Nationalities).

Raphael also lent his voice to the practical building of an American Orthodoxy that could serve the generations born in the New World. He is remembered for recommending the use of an English-language service book in his parishes — a farsighted recognition that the children of his immigrant flock would live and pray in English, and that the Church must speak to them in their language as it had spoken to their parents in Arabic (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; on the English-language question in American Orthodoxy see Orthodoxy in America: the English-Liturgy Movement). In this, as in his Arabic publishing, the principle was constant: the Church must reach its people in the tongue they actually speak.

The Shepherd Who Would Not Leave His Flock

Throughout his episcopate Raphael was repeatedly sought for higher or homeland sees, and he consistently refused, giving as his reason his bond to his American people. He had declined the see of Zahleh in 1901 (see Head of the Syro-Arab Mission), and as bishop he continued to put the American mission first, wishing (in the tradition’s report of his mind) to complete the work he had begun and unwilling to abandon “his American flock” (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). This steadfastness is inseparable from his sanctity as the Church has received it: the Good Shepherd is defined precisely by the fact that he does not flee (John 10:12–13), and Raphael, offered honorable escape more than once, chose each time to stay with the sheep. He would die among them, and be buried among them, and rise, in the Church’s veneration, as their shepherd still (see Repose (1915)).

See Also

• First Orthodox Bishop Consecrated in America (1904) — the consecration that opened this decade
• Head of the Syro-Arab Mission — the mission continued and crowned in the episcopate
• The 1904 Syrian Orthodox Liturgical Work — The Word and his Arabic publishing
• The Russian Mission and the Many Nationalities — the multiethnic Church he served alongside future saints
• Repose (1915) — the death of the shepherd among his flock

References

• Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn.” Lives of the Saints. oca.org. (The continental pastoral travels as bishop; the growth to some thirty parishes and c. 25,000 faithful by 1915; the announcement of Al-Kalimat / The Word late in 1904 and the first issue in January 1905, with Raphael’s own articles; the July 1905 consecration of the grounds and blessing of the orphanage at St. Tikhon’s Monastery; the clergy conference at Old Forge, PA, attended by Ss. Alexis Toth, Alexander Hotovitzky, and John Kochurov; the recommendation of an English-language service book; his repeated refusal of other sees for the sake of his American flock.)
• OrthodoxWiki. “Raphael of Brooklyn.” orthodoxwiki.org. (The Word as the continuing magazine of the Antiochian Archdiocese; St. Nicholas Brooklyn as its primatial cathedral; used to locate, per METHODOLOGY not a terminal citation.)
• Scripture: Luke 15:4–6; John 10:11–16 (the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost and does not flee).