I am an Orthodox Christian ... Are you?

May 22, 2008

#36

MariaM wrote:

The difference is that in the US there was one recognized Orthodox authority - the Church of Russia - officially serving all Orthodox Christians until the Russian Revolution. The Church of Russia provided priests for all Orthodox Christians, and tried to provide for various linguistic communities, but those priests all belonged to the same jurisdiction and answered to the same bishops.

In the US, each ethnicity did NOT have its own churches and bishops \"right from the start.\"

The historical evidence does not support this conclusion. The notion that all Orthodox in America were under the Church of Russia till 1917 is a myth. Sources from the late 19th and early 20th century confirm that the ecclesiastical situation in America was not well organized or defined, and that the Russians themselves could only claim nominal rule over the Arabs (in the person of St. Raphael--who was just as much an agent of the Church of Antioch as of the Church of Russia, if not more so of Antioch), and no rule over the vast majority of Greeks--to say nothing of the other groups. Church records, newspaper articles, and actual documents from bishops of the pre-1917 period are the most reliable primary sources in this field of study. That which comes later, secondary sources, decades after the fact, must be questioned and investigated.

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