Tag: American Orthodox Catholic Church

Fr. Kyrill Johnson, 1897-1947

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...

Photo of the week: a newlywed archbishop

In the half-dozen years before his wedding on April 29, 1933, Archbishop Aftimios Ofiesh had moved further and further away from mainstream Orthodoxy, setting himself up as the head of an "autocephalous" jurisdiction called the American Orthodox Catholic Church—which at its inception in 1927 had the official blessing of the...

This week in American Orthodox history (January 30-February 5)

A lot of Antiochian-related events this week: January 30, 1902: Archimandrite Raphael Hawaweeny, head of the Syro-Arab Orthodox Mission in America, began a pastoral journey to Mexico. Later this week -- on February 3 -- he made a brief stop in Cuba en route to Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. St. Raphael...

HEOCACNA and Bishop Sophronios(us)

Bishop Sophronios/Sophronius (Beshara) was a bishop for the Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church of North America (HEOCACNA), an enterprise started by Bishop Aftimios.  For all intents and purposes, the jurisdictional unity attempt died in 1933.  Bishop Sophronius, however, was the last bishop.  The date of his death has...

Bishop Joseph Zuk: A brief biographical overview

Joseph A. Zuk was the first Ukrainian Orthodox bishop in America, but little has been written about his life. I don't know a lot, but from the sources I've collected, we can piece together a brief biographical sketch. This isn't much, but I thought it might be worthwhile to get...

Fr. Kyrill Johnson, 1897-1947

For a while now, I've been meaning to introduce Fr. Kyrill Johnson, another of the many fascinating early American converts to Orthodoxy. He was born Arthur Warren Johnson in Roxbury, Massachsetts in 1897. I don't know what happened to his parents, but Johnson was adopted by an unmarried aunt, who...

Our Best Chance Yet: an historical reflection on administrative unity

We've tried this before. Over the past century or so, there have been no fewer than five attempts to bring the various ethnic Orthodox jurisdictions in America into some measure of administrative unity. Next week, from May 26-28, we embark upon a sixth effort -- an effort which, compared to its predecessors,...

Fr. Antony Hill: the second black Orthodox priest in America

After a week's worth of articles on the Archbishop Arseny criminal libel case, I thought I'd break things up a bit by looking at something completely different -- the story of Fr. Antony Hill, the second black Orthodox priest in America. By now, a lot of people know that Fr....

The First English-Speaking Parish

For a while now, I have been meaning to write about the first all-English Orthodox parish in America, founded in New York City in 1920. Today, I'm going to give a brief introduction to that parish, and the main characters involved. This is hardly the whole story; it really is...

The Reversal of Platon Rozhdestvensky

On today's podcast on AFR, we discuss the American Orthodox Catholic Church, an early attempt at multi-ethnic jurisdictional unity in the United States. One of the issues brought up was that, within about a year after the creation of the AOCC by Russian Metropolia authorities in February of 1927, the...