The Russian Mission and the Many Nationalities

Before the Russian Revolution, all the Orthodox of North America — of every nationality — belonged to a single archdiocese descended from the Alaskan mission and led by the Russian Church, and Archbishop Tikhon envisioned it as a future multiethnic, self-governing American Church served in many languages. Raphael, the Arab vicar bishop of Brooklyn, was one of the great embodiments of that unity, and its loss after 1917 is the frame of his whole significance.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab-American diaspora)

One Church of Many Nations

The Orthodox Church that Raphael served in America was, in his lifetime, one. The diocese descended from the eighteenth-century Russian mission to Alaska — the mission of St. Herman and the eight Valaam monks (1794) and of St. Innocent (Veniaminov) — had by the later nineteenth century moved its see to the American mainland and had become the ecclesiastical home of all the Orthodox immigrants pouring into the United States and Canada, whatever their nationality (Constance J. Tarasar, ed., Orthodox America 1794–1976, Syosset, NY: OCA, 1975; see Orthodoxy in America: the Alaska Mission and St. Innocent and the Native Church). Under the Russian archbishop of North America there gathered Russians and Ukrainians, Arabs of Antioch, Greeks, Serbs, Carpatho-Rusyns returning from the Unia, Romanians, and Bulgarians — a single Orthodox Church of many nations and many tongues, held together by one hierarchy (Tarasar, Orthodox America, 1975; Mark Stokoe with Leonid Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995).

Within this one Church, the various nationalities were served by clergy of their own language and by vicar (auxiliary) bishops for their communities. Raphael, consecrated Bishop of Brooklyn in 1904, was precisely such a vicar — the bishop for the Syro-Arab flock within the one diocese, not the head of a separate Arab Church (see First Orthodox Bishop Consecrated in America (1904)). His Arab ministry and his Arabic publishing were carried on inside a unity that also embraced the Russians who ordained him and the Greeks and Serbs who were his fellow-faithful. This is the single most important fact for understanding his historical meaning: he was not the founder of a jurisdiction but a bishop of the undivided American Church.

Tikhon’s Conciliar Vision

The presiding genius of this moment was Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin), ruling hierarch of North America from 1898 to 1907 and Raphael’s own consecrator and superior — the future Patriarch of Moscow and confessor (see St. Tikhon of Moscow, esp. Bishop of North America). Tikhon grasped, as few did, that the multiethnic American Church was not a temporary expedient but the seed of something new: a genuinely American, self-governing Orthodox Church, unified in faith and hierarchy while serving each of its peoples in their own language and honoring their traditions (Tarasar, Orthodox America, 1975; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America, 1995). He proposed a structure of national vicariates under a single archbishop — Arab, Serbian, Greek, and others alongside the Russian — as the framework for such a Church, and he consecrated Raphael as the Arab vicar in the spirit of that plan. Tikhon’s vision, articulated most fully in his proposals on the eve of his return to Russia, is one of the great might-have-beens of American Orthodox history: a united, multilingual, American Orthodox Church, conciliar in structure, of which Raphael’s Brooklyn vicariate was a working part (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America, 1995).

The sanctity of this moment is legible in its people. A single diocese, in a single generation, produced a remarkable cluster of saints who knew and worked with one another: Tikhon the archbishop, Raphael the Arab vicar, and the priests Alexis Toth (apostle of the Rusyn return from the Unia), Alexander Hotovitzky, and John Kochurov — men who sat together at the same clergy conferences and built the same Church, and who are now venerated together (Orthodox Church in America, “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn,” Lives of the Saints, oca.org; see Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep). That so many saints should come from one pre-revolutionary American diocese is itself a witness to the spiritual reality of the unity they served.

Raphael as Embodiment of the Unity

Raphael embodied this multiethnic unity more completely, perhaps, than any other single figure. In his own person the several Orthodox worlds met: an Arab of Antioch by birth and cause, formed at the Greek school of Halki and the Russian academies of Kiev and Kazan, consecrated by a Russian archbishop, confessing his faith in Slavonic and Arabic, serving a Syrian flock within a Church of Russians, Greeks, and Serbs (see Student and Teacher at Halki and Kiev; First Orthodox Bishop Consecrated in America (1904)). He was, one might say, the multiethnic American Church made flesh in one man — which is exactly why his memory would become, after the unity shattered, the natural symbol of the unity that was lost (see Legacy).

His pastoral practice matched this catholicity. He served his Arab people in Arabic, but he recommended English service books for their American-born children, and he labored within, and for, a Church that was not merely Arab but Orthodox-in-America (see The 1904 Syrian Orthodox Liturgical Work). His loyalty to the Arab cause (see The Antiochian Arab Cause) was never a narrow ethnic separatism; it was the love of a pastor for his own people held within the love of the one Church for all peoples. In this he modeled precisely the balance Tikhon’s vision required: each nation served in its own tongue, all held in one communion.

The Frame of His Significance

Because Raphael belonged so wholly to this unified pre-1917 Church, its subsequent fragmentation is the indispensable frame of his significance. He died in 1915, two years before the Russian Revolution cut the American Church off from its Russian source and sent it splintering into national jurisdictions (see The Fragmentation after 1917). He therefore never saw the division; he lived and died a bishop of the undivided Church. It is this that makes him, in the memory of American Orthodoxy, the great witness to a lost wholeness — the Arab bishop of the one Church that once was, and to which the jurisdictions that now venerate him all trace their common origin. To set Raphael within the multiethnic Russian mission is thus not merely to describe his institutional home but to grasp why he matters: he is the saint of the unity, glorified in an age that longs for it (see Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Tarasar, Constance J., ed. Orthodox America 1794–1976: Development of the Orthodox Church in America. Syosset, NY: Orthodox Church in America, 1975. (The single multiethnic archdiocese descended from the Alaskan mission; the several nationalities served under one Russian-led hierarchy; the vicariate structure.)
  • Stokoe, Mark, with Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994. Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995. (Archbishop Tikhon’s vision of a multiethnic, self-governing American Church of national vicariates; the pre-1917 unity.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn.” Lives of the Saints. oca.org. (Raphael’s clergy conferences with Ss. Alexis Toth, Alexander Hotovitzky, and John Kochurov under Archbishop Tikhon; his service as vicar bishop of the diocese.)