Legacy

St. Raphael’s legacy has two faces. Concretely, he founded the American Arab Orthodox Church — its mother cathedral, its magazine, its parishes — which grew into the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. Symbolically, he became the patron of Orthodox unity in America, the saint of the undivided Church invoked in the Ligonier-era hope for a single American Orthodoxy.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab-American diaspora); Pan-Orthodox on the unity question

The Founder of the American Arab Orthodox Church

Raphael’s first and most concrete legacy is an institution: the Arab Orthodox Church in North America, which he built from nothing. When he arrived in 1895 there was a single struggling chapel and a scattering of unshepherded immigrants; when he died in 1915 there was a diocese of some thirty parishes and twenty-five thousand faithful, with a mother cathedral, clergy, a cemetery, service books, and a magazine (Orthodox Church in America, “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn,” Lives of the Saints, oca.org; see Head of the Syro-Arab Mission). This Church survived the fragmentation and the decades of internal division that followed his death (see The Fragmentation after 1917) and grew, through the twentieth century, into the present Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America — one of the major Orthodox jurisdictions on the continent (see Antiochian Archdiocese). The Archdiocese honors Raphael as its founder and father, and the continuity is tangible: its primatial cathedral is still St. Nicholas in Brooklyn, the church Raphael acquired and dedicated, and its official magazine is still The Word, the periodical Raphael founded in 1905 (OrthodoxWiki, “Raphael of Brooklyn”; see The 1904 Syrian Orthodox Liturgical Work). Few founders leave institutions so directly and visibly their own.

The Patron of Orthodox Unity in America

Raphael’s second and larger legacy is symbolic, and it has grown rather than faded with time: he has become the patron of the hope for Orthodox unity in America. The logic of this role is set out across the collection (see The Fragmentation after 1917; The Russian Mission and the Many Nationalities). Because he lived and died a bishop of the one undivided American Church, before the fragmentation of 1917; because in his own multiethnic person — Arab, Greek-schooled, Russian-ordained, serving Syrians within a Church of many nations — he embodied that unity more completely than anyone; and because he is now venerated in common by the jurisdictions that descend from that one Church, Raphael stands as the icon of the wholeness American Orthodoxy has lost and hopes to recover. He is the saint no jurisdiction can claim as merely its own and every jurisdiction reveres — and so the natural patron of their reunion.

The Ligonier-Era Aspiration

This symbolic role attached itself with peculiar aptness to the modern high point of the American unity movement, and to a geography that Raphael himself now shares. In 1994 the canonical Orthodox bishops of North America met at Ligonier, Pennsylvania, and issued statements affirming their common commitment to Orthodox unity and mission on the continent and rejecting the notion that they were a “diaspora” of foreign Churches rather than the Church of America — the most notable modern expression of the aspiration to a single American Orthodoxy (see Orthodoxy in America: Ligonier 1994). The Ligonier meeting did not achieve unity — it met with resistance from some of the mother-Churches, and its immediate hopes were not realized — but it fixed “Ligonier” in the American Orthodox imagination as the name of the unity aspiration (see Orthodoxy in America: Overlapping Jurisdictions).

The providential coincidence is that St. Raphael’s relics rest at the Antiochian Village in Ligonier (see Glorification 2000). The saint of the undivided Church lies at the place whose name became the byword for the hope of restoring that unity — and his glorification followed the Ligonier meeting by only six years. The tradition has not been slow to draw the connection: Raphael, the shepherd who gathered the scattered and embodied the one Church, is invoked as the heavenly patron of the very unity for which the bishops contended at Ligonier. His legacy and the unity aspiration have become, in the American Orthodox imagination, a single thing.

The Enduring Institutions

Beyond the symbolism, Raphael’s legacy is carried by durable institutions that continue his work. St. Nicholas Cathedral, Brooklyn — his mother church — remains the seat of the Antiochian Archdiocese. The Word magazine continues, in English, the periodical he founded, still binding a dispersed community through the printed word. The Antiochian Archdiocese itself, with its parishes across the continent, its converts, and its notable role in the English-language mission of American Orthodoxy, is the grown form of the mission he began (see Antiochian Archdiocese). His farsighted openness to English liturgy anticipated one of the great developments of American Orthodoxy, in which the Antiochian Archdiocese would come to play a leading part (see The 1904 Syrian Orthodox Liturgical Work; Orthodoxy in America: the English-Liturgy Movement). In these institutions Raphael’s labor is not merely remembered but continued.

A Legacy for the Whole American Church

Raphael’s legacy, finally, belongs not to one community but to the whole American Church. To the Antiochians he is founder and father; to the OCA he is a glorified hierarch of its own lineage; to all the jurisdictions he is a saint of their common origin and a patron of their hoped-for unity. This breadth is itself the legacy: a saint held in common by a divided Church, whose very veneration is an act of remembered unity. In an American Orthodoxy still seeking its own coherence, Raphael is both a concrete founder and a shared hope — and it is hard to say which of the two will prove, in the long run, the greater gift (see Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn.” Lives of the Saints. oca.org. (The founding and growth of the American Arab Orthodox Church; his institutions.)
  • OrthodoxWiki. “Raphael of Brooklyn.” orthodoxwiki.org. (St. Nicholas Brooklyn as the present primatial cathedral of the Antiochian Archdiocese; The Word as its continuing magazine; used to locate, per METHODOLOGY not a terminal citation.)
  • The hub essays of this repository on American Orthodoxy, especially Ligonier 1994, Overlapping Jurisdictions, and the Antiochian Archdiocese, which carry the detailed sourcing for the unity aspiration and the Archdiocese’s history.
  • Stokoe, Mark, with Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994. Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995. (The institutional continuity from Raphael’s mission to the modern Archdiocese; the Ligonier meeting.)