His Own Words

Because Raphael left writings, we can hear him in his own voice — most substantially in his 1912 pastoral letter to his flock on communion with the Episcopalians, and in the sermon by which he welcomed Archbishop Tikhon in 1898. This file gathers his surviving words with their attribution and context, marking where the evidence is secure and where questions of authorship or transmission arise.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab-American diaspora)

The Character of His Voice

Raphael’s surviving words are those of a pastor and administrator, not a mystic or systematic theologian. He wrote to instruct, to guide, and to govern — service books for his people’s prayer, articles for their edification in The Word, letters for their direction — and his voice in them is direct, firm, and shepherdly, marked by love for his flock and by an uncompromising clarity about the Orthodox faith. We do not have from him the confessional first-person of a spiritual autobiography (see The Sources for His Life); we have instead the public voice of a bishop teaching his Church. That voice is most fully preserved in one document above all.

The 1912 Pastoral Letter on the Episcopalians

Raphael’s most substantial surviving public statement is a pastoral letter issued late in 1912, titled To My Beloved Clergy and Laity of the Syrian Greek-Orthodox Catholic Church in North America, in which he ended a limited earlier arrangement of shared ministrations with the Episcopal Church and forbade his people to seek the sacraments from non-Orthodox clergy (Raphael Hawaweeny, Pastoral Letter, 1912, reproduced in the Orthodox History Project archive, orthodoxhistory.org). The occasion was Raphael’s growing unease with an intercommunion he had cautiously permitted in places where Orthodox faithful had no clergy of their own: recognizing that the Anglican Communion contained sharply divergent theological parties and could not be relied upon to hold the Orthodox faith, he judged that the earlier openness had been mistaken and moved to close it (on the background, contemporary accounts of Raphael’s Episcopalian relations; the letter itself in orthodoxhistory.org).

His own words state the principle. Of the Anglican body he wrote that “there cannot be any intercommunion until she returns to the ancient holy Orthodox Faith and practices, and rejects Protestant omissions and commissions” (Raphael, 1912 Pastoral Letter, orthodoxhistory.org). He directed the Orthodox faithful “not to seek or to accept the ministrations of the Sacraments and rites from any clergy excepting those of the Holy Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church” (ibid.). And he described the condition of his own people, which had prompted the earlier concession — “scattered throughout the whole of North America and deprived of the ministrations of the Church” — the very scattering that his whole ministry existed to remedy (ibid.). He concluded that the Anglican Communion, in the matters vital to Orthodox Christianity, “differs but little from all other Protestant bodies,” so that fellowship was impossible without a fundamental return to the Orthodox faith (ibid.).

The letter is a window onto Raphael’s ecclesiology: a firm confession that the Orthodox Church is the one Church, that its sacraments are not interchangeable with those of the heterodox, and that a bishop’s charity toward his scattered people must never become a compromise of the faith that is their true consolation. It is the clearest surviving statement of his mind.

[Disputed: the authorship and drafting of the 1912 letter. Some accounts note that the English text of the 1912 pastoral letter may have been composed on Raphael’s behalf or with the assistance of a member of his clergy (Fr. Ingram Nathaniel Irvine has been named in this connection), as was not uncommon for formal English documents issued by a hierarch whose primary languages were Arabic and Russian (so certain historical discussions of the letter). Whatever the drafting, the letter was issued under Raphael’s authority as the official teaching of his diocese and expresses his own decision and his own settled position, and it is cited here as his act and his mind. The wording quoted is from the letter as reproduced in the Orthodox History Project archive (orthodoxhistory.org); the underlying primary document is a printed pastoral letter of 1912.]

The 1898 Welcome to Archbishop Tikhon

A second preserved fragment of Raphael’s voice comes from a sermon of 1898, when he welcomed the newly arrived Russian Archbishop Tikhon — his future consecrator — to America. Raphael spoke of the archbishop’s mission as being “to tend the flock of Christ — Russians, Slavs, Syro-Arabs, and Greeks — which is scattered across the entire North American continent” (Raphael Hawaweeny, welcome sermon, 1898, as reported in the biographical accounts, e.g. the narrative at johnsanidopoulos.com summarizing the Life). The sentence is a small jewel of the multiethnic ecclesiology of the pre-1917 Church: Raphael names the several nations — Russians, Slavs, Syro-Arabs, Greeks — as one flock of one Christ under one archbishop, exactly the vision of the unified American Church that his own life embodied (see The Russian Mission and the Many Nationalities). That the words were spoken to Tikhon, and that both men would be glorified, gives the fragment a particular resonance.

The Refusal to Leave His Flock

The tradition also preserves the substance, if not always the exact wording, of Raphael’s repeated refusals of higher sees, in which he gave as his reason his bond to his American people — his wish to complete the work he had begun and his unwillingness to abandon “his American flock” (Orthodox Church in America, “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn,” Lives of the Saints, oca.org; see Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep). These reports come to us in the Life rather than as verbatim quotation, and the collection cites them as the tradition’s account of his stated reasons rather than as certified transcription; but they are consonant with everything the documented record shows of his choices — the declined see of Zahleh, the years of continental travel, the death among his people — and the tradition is on secure ground in reading them as the expression of his mind.

Reading Raphael Through His Words

Taken together, these fragments give a coherent portrait. The 1898 welcome shows his vision — one multiethnic flock of Christ; the 1912 letter shows his conviction — the uncompromised integrity of the Orthodox faith; the refusals show his heart — the shepherd who will not leave his sheep. There is no tension among them: the same man who embraced the many nations of the American Church also refused to blur its faith into the surrounding Protestantism, and stayed with his own people to the end. His words, few as they are, disclose the unity of the man, and the collection reads his life in their light — pinning, per METHODOLOGY §3.5, each to its source and marking where transmission or authorship is uncertain, but hearing in them, with confidence, the authentic voice of the Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep.

References

Raphael Hawaweeny. Pastoral Letter, To My Beloved Clergy and Laity of the Syrian Greek-Orthodox Catholic Church in North America. 1912. Reproduced in the Orthodox History Project archive, orthodoxhistory.org. (The verbatim statements on intercommunion with the Episcopalians; the “scattered throughout the whole of North America” description; the direction to seek the sacraments only from Orthodox clergy; per METHODOLOGY the aggregator is followed to the reproduced primary document.)
Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn.” Lives of the Saints. oca.org. (The reported reasons for his refusal of other sees; the biographical frame.)
Biographical narrative summarizing the OCA Life, e.g. “Saint Raphael (Hawaweeny), Bishop of Brooklyn,” johnsanidopoulos.com. (The 1898 welcome sermon to Archbishop Tikhon naming the “Russians, Slavs, Syro-Arabs, and Greeks” as one scattered flock; per METHODOLOGY used to locate, not as terminal citation.)