The Society for Orthodox Christian History in the Americas
Matthew Namee
(212 comments, 363 posts)
This user hasn't shared any profile information
Posts by Matthew Namee
This week in American Orthodox history (May 14-20)
02 days ago
by Matthew Namee
in Uncategorized
May 17, 1870: The newly ordained convert priest Fr. Nicholas Bjerring celebrated his first Divine Liturgy in St. Petersburg, Russia. He didn’t know Church Slavonic, so he served in German.
May 19, 1884: Archimandrite Stephen Hatherly, a convert priest from England, arrived in Philadelphia. I wrote about Hatherly’s visit almost three years ago. The basic story is this: In 1883, the Russian government closed its chapel, and the priest, Bjerring, became a Presbyterian. Hatherly, a priest under the Ecumenical Patriarchate, heard about these events and asked for permission to make a go at his own New York mission. After getting the all-clear from Russia, he sailed for America in 1884, arriving in Philadelphia on May 19 — this week. But, as I explain in the article, the mission was a failure; the few Orthodox people in New York had little interest in attending a church. Hatherly returned to England disappointed.
One thing I’ve been meaning to do, but haven’t yet, is tell Hatherly’s own story, because it’s phenomenally interesting. He was an exact contemporary of the somewhat better known English convert J.J. Overbeck, an author and editor of the Orthodox Catholic Review. Overbeck wanted to establish a “Western Orthodox Church,” including union with the Church of England, and today he’s regarded as a sort of progenitor of the Western Rite. Hatherly, on the other hand, viewed a full-blown union between Orthodoxy and Anglicanism as unrealistic. Instead, he preferred simply to convert Anglicans to (standard Byzantine Rite) Orthodoxy — something that raised the ire of the Anglican hierarchy, who in turn induced Constantinople to forbid Hatherly from evangelizing his countrymen. On top of all this, Hatherly was an accomplished church musician. As I said, writing an article about his life is on my to-do list.
May 19, 1905: Bishop Tikhon Bellavin, head of the Russian Mission in North America, was elevated to Archbishop by the Holy Synod of Russia.
May 17, 1922: Ecumenical Patriarch Meletios Metaxakis issued a tomos, formally establishing the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America as a jurisdiction under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. As Archbishop of Athens, the controversial Meletios had been in America from 1918-1921, during which time he organized the Greek Archdiocese and convened its first Clergy-Laity Congress. While in America, Meletios was deposed by the Holy Synod of Greece, but soon after this, he was elected Patriarch of Constantinople. This 1922 tomos thus transferred the GOA from Meletios’ old see (Athens) to his new one (Constantinople).
How could he get away with such unilateral action? Well, back in 1908, the Ecumenical Patriarchate had “transferred” the Greek churches in the “diaspora” (particularly America) from itself to Athens. Which is sort of misleading, because a lot of the Greek churches in America were already under Athens, so the transfer affected only that portion of the Greeks who had been under Constantinople. Anyway, Athens didn’t really do much with America over the next decade, until Meletios, as Archbishop of Athens, came along in 1918. In issuing this 1922 tomos, Meletios was revoking the earlier 1908 transfer. And the GOA has been under Constantinople ever since.
May 14, 1957: Archbishop Jeronim Chernov of Eastern Canada (Russian Metropolia) died.
Metropolitan Leonty visiting Los Angeles (LA Daily News, 7/1/1952)
May 14, 1965: Metropolitan Leonty Turkevich, primate of the Russian Metropolia, died. Leonty is one of those giants of American Orthodox history, on par with Tikhon, Iakovos, and Bashir. Many think he’s a saint, and I strongly suspect that they’re right. One of the amazing things about Leonty is that he lived through so much. Originally known as Fr. Leonid, he was a key figure in the Russian Mission dating to the episcopate of St. Tikhon. He ran the seminary, succeeded St. Alexander Hotovitzky as dean of the main cathedral, and generally was the most important priest in the Archdiocese prior to the Russian Revolution.
Then, in 1917, he participated in the monumental All-Russian Sobor — one of the pivotal church councils in Russian history. He made it out of revolutionary Russia and back to the US, where he was, again, probably the key priest in the Russian Metropolia, which rose from the ashes of the Russian Mission. After being widowed, he was almost consecrated a bishop for Aftimios Ofiesh’s American Orthodox Catholic Church experiment, and he ended up becoming the Metropolia’s Bishop of Chicago. When the Metropolia’s primate, Metropolitan Theophilus Pashkovsky, died in 1952, Leonty was elected to be his successor.
Anyway, all that is ridiculously cursory, and I can only fit so much into this article. But Aram Sarkisian, who knows far more about Leonty than I do, will be running a full-length piece here very soon.
May 18, 1970: The Patriarchate of Moscow formally granted autocephaly to the Russian Metropolia in America, which changed its name to the “Orthodox Church in America.” This event reverberated throughout the Orthodox world, and it remains controversial to this day. While everyone recognizes the OCA as fully canonical, only a minority of the world’s Orthodox Churches acknowledge the OCA as an autocephalous Local Church.
May 14, 1972: Tragedy struck at ROCOR’s Holy Trinity Seminary in Jordanville, NY, where one seminarian stabbed another to death. Both men had been studying for the priesthood.
May 15, 1979: Bishop Dionisije Milivojevich, the Serbian Orthodox bishop whose battle with his mother church went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, died in Illinois.
May 18, 1985: Fr. John Karastamatis, a Greek priest in Santa Cruz, CA, was brutally murdered. Some of his admirers immediately declared him to have been martyred for the faith, and to this day, you’ll run into lists of saints that include “Hieromartyr John of Santa Cruz.” But the subsequent police investigation revealed that he was killed by the husband of the parish secretary, and at trial, witness testimony made it clear that Karastamatis was not someone who should be venerated as a saint. I don’t want to get into the gory details, mainly because this didn’t happen all that long ago and Karastamatis’ family is still around, but suffice it to say that while his murder was a great tragedy, the calls for his canonization were terribly misplaced.
May 18, 2000: Archbishop Sylvester Haruns of Montreal (OCA) died.
May 14, 2006: Conclusion of the ROCOR All-Diaspora Council, which approved reconciliation between ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate.
May 17, 2007: In Moscow, ROCOR signed the Act of Canonical Communion, re-establishing full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate.
May 18, 2008: Another big ROCOR moment — Metropolitan Hilarion Kapral was enthroned as First Hierarch of ROCOR.
Fr. Kyrill Johnson, 1897-1947
01 week ago
by Matthew Namee
in Early Converts
Fr. Kyrill Johnson, 1930. This is the only photo I've seen of Johnson taken while he was an Orthodox priest. (Ipswich Historical Society)
A lot of us at SOCHA happen to be really busy right now (personally, I’m in the middle of law school exams), so rather than leave you without much to read this week, here’s an article we originally published back in August 2010.
Fr. Kyrill Johnson was one of many fascinating early American converts to Orthodoxy. He was born Arthur Warren Johnson in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1897. I don’t know what happened to his parents, but Johnson was adopted by an unmarried aunt, who raised him in Ipswich. He went to college at William and Mary in Virginia, which is probably where he first encountered the Orthodox Church. One of his classmates was a fellow named Royce Burden, and both were almost certainly students of young Professor Michael Gelsinger.
Arthur Johnson graduated in 1921. The next year, both Burden and Gelsinger were ordained Orthodox priests and assigned to serve in the “English-speaking department” of the Russian Archdiocese. This “department” had its origins in 1905, when Fr. Ingram Nathaniel Irvine converted to Orthodoxy and was charged by St. Tikhon to do “English work.” Irvine died in early 1921, by which point another convert priest, Fr. Patrick Mythen, had taken over the English-speaking department. Mythen brought numerous Americans into the Orthodox Church, but he was wayward and immature, and many of his converts (along with Mythen himself) ultimately left the Church.
I don’t know what role Mythen played in the conversions of Burden, Gelsinger, and Arthur Johnson, but that trio, unlike so many of their fellow 1920s converts, remained in the Church for the rest of their lives. I don’t know exactly when Johnson was ordained, but he was definitely a priest by 1924. The next year, he earned a Master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School.
Johnson — by now Fr. Kyrill — was a celibate priest, and he doesn’t seem to have had a parish in the 1920s. He may have been under the jurisdiction of Archbishop Aftimios Ofiesh, who oversaw the English-speaking department (and the American Orthodox Catholic Church, into which the English department morphed), but Johnson’s focus, in those years, seems to have been scholarly pursuits. In the mid-’20s, he was a key part of Harvard expeditions to Mount Athos and Mount Sinai, searching for ancient Biblical manuscripts. He also spent time in Syria, where he discovered rare proto-Semitic inscriptions.
In the early 1930s, Johnson was back in Ipswich, where he published several books on local history. In 1938, he became pastor of St. George Antiochian church in nearby Lawrence, Mass. — as far as I can tell, this was his first parish assignment in at least 14 years as an Orthodox priest. In 1940, he took on another job, becoming the head of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. The organization, which today has the more palatable name “Historic New England,” owns and preserves historic homes and other buildings in New England. The next year, 1941, Metropolitan Antony Bashir elevated Johnson to archimandrite. Johnson lived only six more years, dying in 1947, at the age of just 50.
So far, I’ve basically given you a dry biography of Fr. Kyrill Johnson. What sort of person was he, though? Pat Tyler of the Ipswich Historical Society happened to know Johnson when she was young. A few years ago, she told me, “He lived across the street from me — to the Yankees in town, he was just ‘strange,’ in that black robe.” Later, she added, “I knew him in the 30′s just as the guy across the street – I was just a child. My mother, of course, knew him. She and her friend, Helen, actually spent the night at the beach (Crane’s) with Arthur. I picture the scene as teenagers spouting Shakespeare. And Platonic to the max.”
Here’s another account of Johnson, from the book Becoming What One Is, by Austin Warren: “Friends brought acquaintances; and I remember […] Arthur Johnson of Ipswich, a swarthy, lean, Byzantine-looking bachelor, who, a pure Yankee and reared a Methodist, had become (after an Anglican interlude) an ordained deacon in the Greek Orthodox Church.”
Arthur Johnson's graduation photo from the College of William and Mary, 1921 (Ipswich Historical Society)
Back in college, Johnson’s class elected him “most eccentric man.” He was extremely involved in his school activities — class historian, student council secretary, associate editor of the student newspaper, editor-in-chief of the college literary magazine. He was in a drama club, manager of the debate council… I could go on, but I think you get the point. He never married, of course, and I get the sense that nobody who knew him was surprised by this fact. He was odd, friendly, bookish. He was also a talented writer.
Of the three William and Mary converts — Johnson, Burden, and Gelsinger — Johnson was clearly the least well-known, and probably the least influential. But he lived a fascinating life, and stands out as one of the few convert priests of the 1920s who remained in the Orthodox Church until the day he died.
This week in American Orthodox history (May 7-13)
01 week ago
by Matthew Namee
in Uncategorized
This week’s installment of our “This week” series is unusually brief, because I’m in the middle of final exams for law school. I hope you’ll understand, and I should be back next week with a full-length piece.
May 9, 1870: The newly chrismated convert Nicholas Bjerring was ordained to the Orthodox priesthood in St. Petersburg, Russia.
May 13, 1888: The Orthodox of Chicago — mostly Greeks and Serbs — held a meeting to organize a multiethnic parish. I did one of my first podcast episodes on this meeting.
May 7, 1890: Andrij Chahovtsov — the future Archbishop Arseny of Winnipeg – was ordained to the priesthood in Russia.
May 7, 1909: Fr. Alexis Toth died in Wilkes-Barre, PA. From the local newspaper, the Times Leader, later that day:
Father Toth was of princely bearing, not much in sympathy with democratic institutions, but yet very deferential to the customs of the people here. He was a rigid disciplinarian but very popular among the members of his congregation here. His death will be a great surprise. He was ill about five months, but because of his somewhat secluded position few outside the members of his congregation knew of his indisposition.
Toth, of course, had converted to Orthodoxy from Greek (or “Eastern Rite,” or “Uniate”) Catholicism, way back in 1891. He became the leading advocate of the so-called “return of the Unia,” which utterly changed the face of the Russian Mission in North America. The OCA canonized Toth several years ago because of his historical role.
May 13, 1917: Fr. Aftimios Ofiesh was consecrated a bishop by Archbishop Evdokim Meschersky and Bishop Alexander Nemolovsky. Aftimios was given the title “Bishop of Brooklyn,” and, as the Russian-backed successor to St. Raphael Hawaweeny, he was placed in charge of the Syro-Arab Mission in America.
This took place just three weeks after the first Syrian church, St. George of Worcester, MA, declared its loyalty to the visiting Antiochian Metropolitan Germanos Shehadi, rather than to the soon-to-be-consecrated Aftimios. We covered this a few weeks ago; there were now two rival Arab bishops in America, and the Russy-Antacky schism was underway.
May 10, 1966: Bishop Stefan Lastavica, head of the Middle Western Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church in America, died.
May 13, 2006: Jaroslav Pelikan, the great church historian and convert to Orthodoxy, died. Pelikan had joined the Orthodox Church back in 1998, after which he served on the board of trustees for St. Vladimir’s Seminary. For more on Pelikan, see this 2003 article by Fr. John Erickson, which includes this great quote from Pelikan himself: “Everybody else is an expert on the present. I wish to file a minority report on behalf of the past.”
May 12, 2008: Archbishop Hilarian Kapral was elected First Hierarch of ROCOR.
May 8, 2010: Fr. Michael Dahulich, formerly the dean of St. Tikhon’s Seminary, was consecrated OCA Bishop of New York.
Churches on wheels: then and now
11 week ago
by Matthew Namee
in Uncategorized
A Russian priest baptizes a family in the church car aboard the "mobile medical center" named for St. Luke of Simferopol. Photo from MSNBC.
On April 27, MSNBC published photos of a medical train in Russia that includes a full-blown Orthodox chapel (thanks to the excellent Byzantine, TX blog for the link). The train/clinic, named after the great surgeon-bishop St. Luke of Simferopol, travels to the far reaches of Siberia and has “a carriage that operates as a mobile Orthodox church.”
A priest rings the bells on the church car. Photo from MSNBC.
This seems like a pretty innovative idea, but actually, it’s well over a hundred years old. Way back in 19th century Russia, Orthodox missionaries began using a pretty much identical arrangement on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. From Boston Globe, December 29, 1896:
Cathedral Car for Bleak Wastes of Siberia.
American Missionary Idea Adopted by Greek Church Priests.
The missionary railroad car, invented by an American clergyman, has been taken up by the Russian church authorities, and four of these peripatetic disseminators are now regularly used in Siberia.
The Scientific American illustrates the style of cars used by the Greek missionaries in the bleak plains of Siberia. The car is moved from station to station, and the Siberian peasants liberally take advantage of the chances thus offered for attending services.
The Russian cars are fitted up with much of the rich barbarity and splendor of oriental art. The interiors of the walls are covered with painted images, and the car is provided with an altar, a tabernacle, candelabra, and the trappings pertaining to the ritual of the Russian Greek service.
Access to this traveling church is had in the usual way. At one end of the car is a chime of bells, and the top is surmounted by Greek crosses.
The idea was first used in the United States in sparsely settled parts of the country, such as Montana. It was readily seized upon by English missionaries, who ordered a number of these cars built for India.
Greek priests at once saw the advantage derived from the missionary car, and the Russian government commissioned a number of them for use in Siberia, where settlements are far between and the people can seldom attend divine services.
Here’s the illustration that accompanied that 1896 Boston Globe article:
Russian Orthodox "church car" on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, 1896
A year earlier, the New York Times had referred to these mobile Russian Orthodox chapels as “churches on wheels.” I’ve been able to trace them back to at least 1886, when the journal Christian Union ran a note about a plan for “church cars” on trains in Russia.
I’m curious to know more about the modern-day church cars. Is the St. Luke of Simferopol train the only one with a chapel, or do other Russian trains include special cars for Orthodox worship? Also, I assume that the church cars made in the 19th century fell out of use after the Bolshevik Revolution — so who is responsible for re-introducing the idea? If any of our readers have more information, please let me know, and I’ll publish an update to this article.
Author & Hollywood screenwriter Elliot Paul converts to Orthodoxy
02 weeks ago
by Matthew Namee
in Early Converts
Photo from the Abilene (TX) Reporter-News, April 7, 1958
On March 5, 1958, the New York Times ran the following article:
AUTHOR ADOPTS FAITH
Elliot Paul, in Hospital, Joins Greek Orthodox Church
PROVIDENCE, R.I., March 4 (AP) — Elliot Paul, author, became a member of the Greek Eastern Orthodox Church today in bedside ceremonies at the Veterans Administration Hospital here.
Mr. Paul is seriously ill with arteriosclerosis and heart disease. When he entered the hospital a few weeks ago, he listed his religion as “agnostic.” He was born in Malden, Mass., a member of a Congregational family.
The 68-year-old author said his desire for conversion came from his admiration for Greek Orthodox friends whose faith and warmth appealed to him.
Elliot Paul lived a fascinating life. He worked as a journalist, authored novels, and later wrote ten Hollywood screenplays, most notably Rhapsody in Blue. His friends included the famed novelists James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. He was a huge fan of jazz, moonlighting as a pianist and writing the screenplay for Billie Holliday’s only acting role. Paul was married (and divorced) five times, and, as the Times indicates, he identified as an agnostic until the very end of his life.
And it was the very end — just a month after joining the Church, Paul died of his ailments. His obituary in the Bridgeport Post offers a bit more detail on his conversion: “After his hospitalization, Paul mentioned his desire to enter the church to the hospital Protestant chaplain, Rev. Frank S. Hall. The chaplain notified the Very Rev. John A. Limberakis, pastor of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation.”
The obituary also re-emphasized that the biggest factor in Paul’s conversion was the faith and love of his Orthodox friends. It’s a reminder that quiet example and loyal friendship can be just as effective as overt evangelization.
