St Raphael Hawaweeny vs the Pope of Rome

In 1894, Pope Leo XIII issued a papal encyclical on the "Eastern Rites" -- that is, the Uniates, those groups who use ancient Orthodox liturgical rites but submit themselves to the Pope of Rome. In 1898, St Raphael Hawaweeny, then an archimandrite in New York, published a response in a...

Son of Antioch: The American Ministry of Metropolitan Antony Bashir

Antony Bashir arrived in America in 1922, as a 24-year-old archdeacon. He and Archimandrite Victor Abo-Assaly were accompanying the Antiochian Metropolitan Gerasimos Messara, who was ostensibly coming to the US to attend a convention of the Episcopal Church in Portland, Oregon. Soon, however, another agenda emerged: the establishment of an...

Patriarch Bartholomew’s Enthronement Speech

On October 22, 1991, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was enthroned in Istanbul. As far as I can tell, his enthronement speech has never been published in English, although a broadcast of the enthronement -- available on YouTube -- conveniently includes an English voiceover. My research assistant Cassidy Irwin transcribed that voiceover....

Amazing 1915 Letter on Jurisdictionalism in American Orthodoxy

The following remarkable letter appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on March 18, 1915. It offers a well-informed but obviously partisan perspective on the Orthodox reality in America and globally in 1915 -- in the midst of World War I. There's so much happening in this letter, so many layers. It...

Freemasonry and the Orthodox Church

A quick bit of self-promotion: In January 2025, I’ll be teaching a live, 4-week course on American Orthodox History for the Orthodox Studies Institute at Saint Constantine College. I hope many of you can join me — you can learn more and register for the course by clicking here. ***...

New Book on American Orthodox Saints

Holy Trinity Publications, out of Jordanville, NY, has just published a book that will surely be of interest to many readers of this website: Glorified in America: Laborers in the New World from Saint Alexis to Elder Ephraim. Originally published in Greek, the book was written by the monks of the Monastery...

How Did Orthodoxy Get Into This Mess?

It almost goes without saying that the Orthodox world is a mess right now. The situation in Ukraine alone is a disaster: a Russian invasion of the country backed by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) by the state, and a recognized-by-only-some Orthodox Church of...

The Condemnation of Unauthorized Orthodox Teachers in 19th Century Greece

The history of Orthodoxy in 19th century Greece is extraordinarily complicated. Beginning with the Greek Revolution in 1821, the Church of Greece began to detach itself from the Ecumenical Patriarchate, declaring itself autocephalous in 1833 -- a status that was not recognized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate until 1850. This newly-independent...

Fr Seraphim Rose and “Corrective Baptism”

There is not universal agreement about the manner in which converts are received into the Orthodox Church. In some Orthodox jurisdictions, all converts are received via baptism and chrismation, regardless of whether they were previously baptized in a heterodox tradition. Others receive these types of converts via chrismation only, provided...

A Patriarchate Is Not a Church

The Greek term typically translated as “Church” in the English New Testament (ekklesia, which can also mean “assembly”) is used throughout the Greek Old Testament to refer to the gathering together of the people of Israel. Its meaning is the same as in the New Testament—the Church is the assembly...