Tag: American Orthodox Catholic Church

The Origins of the “Myth of Unity”

Back in June, I gave a paper at St. Vladimir's Seminary entitled, "The Myth of Past Unity and the Origins of Jurisdictional Pluralism in American Orthodoxy." The unwieldy title notwithstanding, the premise of my paper was simple: that the commonly-held story of a unified American Orthodoxy which fragmented after the...

The <strike>First</strike> Second Convert Orthodox Bishop in America

2019 UPDATE: Years after I wrote this article, I learned about Stephen Dzubay, who converted to Orthodoxy from the Ruthenian Catholics and became Orthodox, being consecrated in 1916 to head a Carpatho-Rusyan diocese under the Russian Metropolia. He is therefore likely the first convert bishop in American Orthodox history. Like...

From Aftimios Ofiesh to <i>The Satan Seller</i>

One of my odd hobbies in historical research is wandering the strange hinterlands of episcopi vagantes on the Internet. I think I first became interested in the phenomenon as I studied Abp. Aftimios Ofiesh (as previously mentioned, the subject of my M.Div. thesis). When I first encountered Aftimios's name, it...

“When we speak of Tsarist pressure”

In the late 1920s, after Abp. Aftimios Ofiesh (the successor to St. Raphael in the see of Brooklyn and the subject of my M.Div. thesis and possible future book) had in 1927 established, with the blessing of the Russian Metropolia, the so-called "American Orthodox Catholic Church," he engaged in something...