Raphael of Brooklyn

Origins and formation

He was born on November 8, 1860, at Beirut, and given at baptism the name Raphael. His parents were Damascene — refugees from the great massacre of the Christians of Damascus that had erupted that same year, in which his family, like thousands of others, had fled the city for the safety of the coast. His father, Michael Hawaweeny, was a subdeacon and cantor; the household was poor, devout, and steeped in the life of the Church of Antioch. When the danger passed the family returned to Damascus, and there the boy was raised in the shadow of the patriarchal cathedral.

His gifts were marked early. He was educated first in the patriarchal school at Damascus, then — the Church of Antioch in that century being largely dependent on Greek and Russian institutions for higher learning — at the Theological School of Halki near Constantinople, and finally, on a scholarship, at the Theological Academy of Kiev in the Russian Empire, where he completed his formal theological education and was formed in the Russian Orthodox tradition that would shape the rest of his life. He was ordained deacon in 1885 and priest, rising to the dignity of archimandrite, and served the Patriarch of Antioch as a preacher and representative; for a time he taught Arabic at the Theological Academy of Kazan in Russia, a bridge between the Antiochian and the Russian Churches whose union in his own person would prove providential.

The call to America

By the last decades of the nineteenth century a great migration had carried tens of thousands of Arab Orthodox Christians from Syria and Lebanon to the cities and mill-towns of the United States and Canada. They arrived without priests, without churches, without a bishop of their own tongue — scattered, exposed to proselytism, and in danger of losing the faith of their fathers in a strange land. At that time the whole of Orthodox North America lay under the single omophorion of the Russian Orthodox Mission, and it was to Russia and to Antioch together that the immigrants' appeals were addressed.

In 1895 Archimandrite Raphael was sent to New York to serve this community — the Syro-Arab Orthodox faithful — under the Russian Mission. He found them "as sheep having no shepherd," and the phrase that would become his title was the plain truth of his ministry: he was the Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep in America. He gathered the first Arab Orthodox congregation of New York, established the cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Brooklyn as its centre, and made it the mother-church of Arab Orthodoxy in the New World — today the primatial cathedral of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.

Bishop of Brooklyn

The community grew beyond what one priest could serve, and the Russian Mission, under its far-sighted head Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin) — the future Patriarch of Moscow and confessor — resolved to give the Arab faithful a bishop of their own blood. On March 12/13, 1904, in the cathedral at Brooklyn, Archimandrite Raphael was consecrated Bishop of Brooklyn by Archbishop Tikhon and Bishop Innocent (Pustynsky) — the first Orthodox episcopal consecration ever performed on the soil of North America, and a foundation-stone of Orthodoxy on the continent. As auxiliary to Tikhon he governed the Syro-Arab Mission, and he threw himself into a labour that never let him rest.

He travelled the length and breadth of the continent — a bishop perpetually on the road, seeking out the smallest and most isolated communities of his people, from the eastern seaboard to the western territories and into Canada, consecrating churches, ordaining priests, catechising, reconciling. He founded, by the reckoning of his biographers, some thirty parishes. He laboured for the whole Orthodox mission and not only for his own: he helped Saint Tikhon to organise the American Church, took part in the founding of Saint Tikhon's Monastery at South Canaan, Pennsylvania (1905), and supported the seminary and the missionary work among all the peoples the young Church served — Russians, Syrians, Greeks, and the newly-converted.

He was, besides, a man of the printed word. Knowing that his scattered flock needed the services in their own hands, he produced at Brooklyn the first Orthodox liturgical books published in America in Arabic — among them a service-book of the divine offices — and he founded and edited the periodical al-Kalimat ("The Word") to bind his people together in faith and news across a continent. What he could not reach in person he reached in print.

Repose

The unremitting toil of two decades broke his health. Bishop Raphael reposed on February 27, 1915, at Brooklyn, in the fifty-fifth year of his age, mourned by a people who had known no other bishop. His funeral drew a great multitude of the Orthodox of every nation in America, and he was buried at the cathedral; his relics were afterward translated to the grounds of Saint Tikhon's Monastery in Pennsylvania, where they rest. The Church he had planted — a single struggling mission of immigrant congregations — has grown into the flourishing Antiochian Archdiocese and is woven into the whole fabric of American Orthodoxy; and the memory of the tireless bishop who gathered its first generation never faded among his people.

Glorification

In 2000 Bishop Raphael was glorified as a saint — canonised jointly by the Orthodox Church in America (the successor of the Russian Mission under which he had served) and the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese (the heir of the Church of Antioch that had sent him), the two Churches whose union in his own life he had embodied. The Holy Synod of the OCA proclaimed his sainthood in the spring of 2000, and the solemn glorification services were celebrated in May 2000 at Saint Tikhon's Monastery, where his relics lie. He is honoured as Saint Raphael of Brooklyn, the first-fruits of Orthodox sanctity on the North American continent among its bishops.