Tag: Statistics

How Many Orthodox Christians Are in the World?

In 1991, when Bartholomew I was enthroned as Ecumenical Patriarch, the Los Angeles Times ran the following headline: "Bartholomeos I Installed as Leader of 200 Million Orthodox Christians." Six years later, in 1997, the same newspaper wrote of Patriarch Bartholomew's visit to Southern California, describing him as "spiritual leader of the...

Statistics on Celibate & Widower Bishops in American Orthodoxy

Metropolitan Orestes Chornock, widower bishop and founding primate of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese I have a list of 213 Orthodox bishops who have served in America. Of these, 179 were never married (we'll call them "celibates"), and the other 34 were widowers. So 84% celibates, 16% widowers. (Two of...

Plans for an English-speaking seminary & an Orthodox census in 1943

Back in the early 1940s, several of the Orthodox jurisdictions briefly came together to form an organization with the unwieldy name, "The Federated Orthodox Greek Catholic Primary Jurisdictions in America." That's ridiculous, so we'll just call it "the Federation." Anyway, the Federation was a precursor to SCOBA, which morphed into...

Orthodox bishops in 1859

I ran across this the other day -- in 1859, there were 278 Orthodox bishops in the world: Church Bishops Constantinople (including Romania, Bulgaria, and part of Serbia) 136 Russia (including Georgia) 65 Greece 24 Antioch 17 Jerusalem 14 Austria (now Serbia, mostly) 11 Alexandria 5 Cyprus 4 Mount Sinai 1...

The Atlas of American Orthodox Christian Churches

Editor's note: We've received the following announcement from Alexei Krindatch, the Orthodox researcher and sociologist. Very soon, the first-ever Atlas of American Orthodox Christian Churches, edited by Krindatch, will be published by Holy Cross Orthodox Press. I have made several contributions to the Atlas, including the historical census data, a...

Clergy salaries in 1916

Before I get started, I wanted to let you all know that I do plan to finish my series on St. Raphael and the Syrian controversies of 1905. However, I've got several other irons in the fire, so I'm going to take a little time off of that project to...

St. Alexander Hotovitzky on language in the Church

On November 4, 1905, a religious and literary journal entitled The Friend published a letter by St. Alexander Hotovitzky, dean of St. Nicholas Cathedral in New York. Hotovitzky wrote in response to an article in The Friend which claimed, "In this Russian service, of course, no one understood what was...

Historical Census Data for Orthodoxy in America

Last week, Alexei Krindatch released his landmark 2010 census of Orthodox churches in the United States. (Also last week, Krindatch was interviewed by Kevin Allen on Ancient Faith Radio. Click here to listen.) Sifting through the census data, I naturally got to thinking about historical censuses. Every ten years, from...

2010 Census of Orthodox Christian Churches in the USA

Over the past decade, my friend, the incomparable sociologist Alexei Krindatch, has developed a reputation for his remarkable studies of Orthodox Christianity in America. The full collection of his work is housed at www.orthodoxreality.org. Today, Alexei has released the results of his latest and most ambitious project yet -- a census of...

The most common names of American Orthodox clergy

Recently, I did a study of the most common names of American Orthodox parishes. In response, Christopher Orr commented, "I wonder what a similar study of clergy (bishop, priest, deacon) names would show. My guess would be Michael, John and George, and perhaps also Nicholas, with Alexander also very popular among...