Holy Hierarch Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn

Saint Raphael of Brooklyn
قديس رافائيل من بروكلين‎ال

The twenty-seventh of February is the feast-day of the Syrian-American Orthodox bishop, Saint Raphael of Brooklyn. A man of humble origins, a mighty scholarly mind, a stout Russophile, a caring archpastor – even though he could be a bit rough-and-tumble at times – his was a varied and colourful immigrant life which ought to be celebrated by all Americans. Not just Syrian-Americans, not just New Yorkers and not just Orthodox.

Those of you who follow me on social media may recognise my Facebook intro blurb: ‘English-Jewish-American by birth, Chinese by education, Russian by jurisdiction, Arab at heart.’ This is a shameless and shanzhai pastiche of a quote from our saintly hierarch of today’s feast, who when describing himself said: ‘I am an Arab by birth, a Greek by primary education, an American by residence, a Russian at heart, and a Slav in soul.’ The fact is that Saint Raphael’s life and works are in all too many ways emblematic of the contradictory and fragmentary experiences, at once highly-cosmopolitan and highly-localised, that seem to accompany not only cradle Orthodox in the Americas but also those of the converts who come to them.

Saint Raphael Hawaweeny [Ar. Rufâ’îl Hawâwînî رفائيل هواويني‎] was born in 1860 in Beirut, in the semi-autonomous Druze Emirate of Mount Lebanon, to Damascene Syrian Arab parents. His birth date is unknown, but it is thought to be close to his name-day on the eighth of November. Mîkâ’îl and Maryam Hawâwînî were at that time fleeing a brutal massacre of Shî‘ites and Christians by Druze and Sunnî sectarians in Damascus – the same in which Saint Yûsif was martyred. Saint Raphael’s birth thus seems to have reflected the birth, the persecution and the flight into Ægypt of the Lord he was to serve with devotion in his later life. His parents returned from their Lebanese refuge to their home the following year.

Raphael was a serious and clever student, as proven in his elementary education. It must be remembered that at this time in the Ottoman Empire, there was no such thing as sæcular public education; each millet (religious community) was responsible for providing educational services to its own group – Muslims for Muslims, Christians for Christians, Jews for Jews. But Raphael’s parents, being poor, were not able to afford the tuition to send him to a university by the time he graduated primary school in 1874. Thankfully, the local deacon Athanasios ‘Atallâh had noticed the newly-tonsured reader Raphael’s intellectual acuity and natural curiosity, and applied to Patriarch Ierótheos of Antioch to have him invited to the Œcumenical Patriarchate seminary on Halki. Raphael worked as a schoolteacher himself in Damascus, and was tonsured a monk, before he was accepted at the Theological School of Halki in 1879.

His graduate thesis, handwritten in Greek and translated into English by Fr Patrick Viscuso along with some accompanying commentary, was The True Significance of Sacred Tradition and Its Great Worth. This document is a remarkable piece of scholarship. It’s primarily meant as an apologetic for Orthodoxy over-against the aggressive missionary claims of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism – in the context of nineteenth-century colonialism by the Western great powers in the Middle East, let it be understood. It is carefully argued and draws upon a healthy admixture of classical Christian authorities from both east (Origen, Sozomen, Basil, Gregory, John, Clement, Cyril, Dionysius, Eusebius) and west (Jerome, Tertullian, Augustine, Vincent of Lérins, Ambrose). Even so, this apologetics exercise seems to have been something of a foreshadowing of his future career and some of the conflicts it would bring.

He was ordained as a deacon, either while at Halki or shortly afterwards, and returned to his native Syria in 1886. He grew close to the new Patriarch of Antioch, Gerasimos, who took him with him on his travels around Syria, to visit the parishes under his see in the millet system. When the Patriarch himself could not be present, he would send Deacon Raphael in his place to preach the Gospel and to attend to the needs of the Syrian Christians. He was offered, and accepted, a scholarship at the Theological Academy in Kiev, Russia, where he enrolled as a student. He was ordained a priest in 1889.

Here he became involved at the intersection of sæcular politics with the life of the Church in Antioch, strongly taking the side of Arab nationalist sentiment in its embryonic stage. Deacon Raphael’s beloved elder in the Church, Patriarch Gerasimos, resigned his see as Patriarch of Antioch to serve instead as Patriarch of Jerusalem. The man who took his place, unfortunately, was Patriarch Spyridon Euthymiou – a Greek Cypriot whose appointment from Constantinople in 1891 was met in Antioch with justifiable outrage, both because that appointment was made ‘over the heads’ of the Antiochian bishops, and because there were several financial ‘irregularities’ in which Patriarch Spyridon was personally involved that inevitably caused problems for the Antiochian Church’s reputation. Saint Raphael’s voice was one of the strongest against Patriarch Spyridon’s appointment, and he was disciplined with suspension from his priestly functions when he refused to commemorate him in the diptychs.

Saint Raphael met his suspension with equanimity, but continued to publish articles in the Russian press agitating for Patriarch Spyridon’s replacement and arguing for the election of a local bishop in his place. When the Russian state was convinced to crack down on his editorials, he began publishing his defences of Antioch in book form – including a book on the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre (of which Patriarch Spyridon was a member). Patriarch Spyridon continued to pressure the Russian government to silence Saint Raphael, but the two men were reconciled grudgingly thanks to the efforts of the assistant Oberprokurator of the Russian Synod, and Saint Raphael was allowed to transfer to the Russian Church.

Saint Raphael was transferred from Kiev to New York in 1895, in response to a request from the Syrian Orthodox Benevolent Society of New York for a priest who understood Arabic. He arrived in New York on the second of November in that year, and assisted Bishop Nicholas in celebrating the Divine Liturgy at the Russian Church there three days later, on his first Sunday in America. For the Syrian Arab parishioners he managed to find a suitable second-storey space on Washington Street in lower Manhattan, and convert it into an Orthodox chapel. He had brought with him several blessed items, including a cross and altarcloth, from Russia which could be put to use in the Liturgy, and so he did. Saint Raphael embarked on pastoral visits to thirty cities and a plethora of smaller towns in his first three years in America – being a good shepherd, he would not leave one sheep gone astray – but much of his time was spent among the Syrian Arab community in New York.

In 1897 Fr Raphael published a hefty ‘five-pounder’ book in Arabic, The Book of True Consolation in the Divine Prayers for use in the churches serving Syrian Orthodox. An updated version of this book is still in use in the Antiochian Church. That same year, Bishop Nicholas was replaced by a broad-minded and patient Russian, Bishop Tikhon (Bellavin), who developed a good working relationship and a fast friendship with Fr Raphael. He was sent on a peace-brokering mission to end a sectarian feud in the Arab community in Johnstown, PA, when word reached him by telegraph of the election of Patriarch Meletios (Dûmâni) to the Patriarchate of Antioch. Saint Raphael rejoiced – for the first time in 168 years, he told his people, an Arab had been chosen to lead the Antiochian Church!

Patriarch Meletios was known to Fr Raphael from when he was Bishop of Latakia; for he had been one of the people to sponsor his education at the Theological School at Halki. The two of them were on good terms, and soon after his election Meletios invited Saint Raphael to return to the Middle East and take up a position as an auxiliary Bishop in Beirut. Later Patriarch Meletios would renew the invitation, having named him honorary Bishop of Zahleh. However, Saint Raphael politely declined both times, on the grounds that his American immigrant flock needed him more. Saint Raphael bought a section of Mount Olivet cemetery on Long Island to be used for Orthodox Church funerals in 1901, and found the means to purchase and remodel an existing church building in Brooklyn on Pacific Street, for the Arab Christian community which was growing rapidly there. Saint Tikhon consecrated the grounds, to the great joy of the Arab Orthodox faithful. Shortly after this, at the request of Saint Tikhon, Raphael himself was named by the Russian Synod as Bishop of Brooklyn in Great Lent of 1904 – the first Orthodox bishop to be consecrated on American soil.

Bishop Raphael took care of the needs of his people in other ways, as well. He was closely associated with a politically pro-labour and pro-immigrant rights weekly Arabic-language newspaper for New Yorkers, Mirât al-Gharb (مرآة الغرب, Western Mirror) founded by Najîb Mûsâ Diyâb in 1899. But in 1905 he personally started a monthly journal al-Kalima (الكلمة, The Word), which had a more religious focus. His intention in starting this journal was to reach not only the people within his immediate environment in the United States, but to witness the Gospel of Christ to people whom he would never meet in person.

At this point in America’s history, Syrian Arab immigrants were largely poor, and largely came from peasant backgrounds. Many of them had become poor because they had destroyed their food crops to plant mulberry trees for sericulture, but when the Ottoman silk trade dried up many of them were left destitute and hungry. These people ended up coming to New York often with nothing to their names. The Syrians of New York often found work as street pedlars, and capitalised on an American fascination with the Middle East to help them find and expand their businesses. Americans were not particularly hostile to the new Syrian arrivals, but neither was their experience of the tussle of New York always positive. There were occasional street fights between Syrians and Irish immigrants in particular. And within the Arab community there were sectarian differences that blew up into violent outbursts.

One of these involved a gunfight which started as a war of editorials between the above-mentioned Orthodox paper Mirât al-Gharb and the Maronite paper al-Hudâ (الهدى, The Guide), edited by the liberal Francophile Na‘ûm Mûkarzil. In the late summer months of 1905, al-Hudâ had begun publishing an escalating string of calumnious attacks on Mirât al-Gharb, its editor Mr Diyâb, and the Orthodox community in general; Mirât responded in kind. When Saint Raphael himself took to print in Mirât al-Gharb in an attempt to defuse the situation, Mûkarzil turned his poison pen on the bishop himself. The libellous Lebanese accused Saint Raphael of, among other things: aggrandising himself above Russian nobility; calling for physical violence; subscribing to the Donatist hæresy; drinking and gambling. Needless to say, the Orthodox were not particularly pleased with this treatment of their bishop, and Saint Raphael had to restrain them from taking reprisals, telling them that he had forgiven Mûkarzil for his libels and they should do the same.

But Mûkarzil and his followers were not interested in peace. Street scuffles between Orthodox and Maronite Syrians occurred in August, and in early September an Orthodox man named Niqûlâ ‘Abû Samrah was attacked and beaten by two club-wielding Maronites as he boarded a ferry. Laid up at home, Saint Raphael and some dozen Orthodox parishioners – some armed – went to visit ‘Abû Samrah at his home on Pacific Street. To do so they went out in front of the house of Na‘ûm Mûkarzil, who had some of his friends over to stay – some armed.

What happened next becomes muddied because the journalistic accounts vary widely in the sequence and timing of events. But it is clear that a pitched shootout erupted between Saint Raphael’s party and Mûkarzil’s party. Twenty shots at least were fired, but no one was hurt. The police rushed to the scene and gave chase to the combatants, and a certain Irish police officer named Mallon arrested Bishop Raphael and accused him in court of brandishing a Smith & Wesson revolver at him. For his part, Bishop Raphael claimed he never carried a gun. Eventually Bishop Raphael was exonerated, though bad blood continued to exist between the Maronites and the Orthodox for some time afterward.

Saint Raphael became acquainted with many of the clergy active in the Metropolia at the time, including Fr Alexis (Tovt), Fr Alexander (Hotovitskii) and Fr John (Kochurov) – all of whom would become saints. He paid particular attention in his archpastoral ministry to children. The Syrian Arab community had become accustomed of long practice under the Ottomans to assimilating to the dominant cultural force, and that did not change with their passage across the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Syrian parents were eager to raise their children to speak English fluently, and as a result they were attending sæcular schools and losing their Orthodox formation. Saint Raphael advocated strongly for English-language church school programmes and Liturgical formation in the English language. He supported the use of Isabel Florence Hapgood’s translation of the Service Book in Divine Liturgy.

Saint Raphael’s habitual modesty was evident in one incident which happened on the Sunday of Orthodoxy in 1911. He was honoured by the Russian Bishop Platon for his fifteen years of service as a bishop in the Americas, and was gifted with a silver icon of the Saviour for his efforts. For his own part he failed to understand why he should be honoured merely for doing what was due from him, and he made no claim to any extraordinary gifts. He considered himself an ‘unworthy servant’, and yet of the lot which fell to him he left no part unfulfilled.

In 1912 Bishop Raphael was diagnosed with a chronic illness of the heart which would eventually claim his life, but he took no ease in his labours despite it. He celebrated the Liturgy two weeks after being released from the hospital, and in the three years which followed continued to visit Orthodox parishes in cities throughout the United States. He fell ill again in February of 1915 and spent the last two weeks of his life at his home in Brooklyn, bearing his illness with patience. He reposed in the Lord on the twenty-seventh of that month.

Saint Raphael was not a wonderworker in life, nor a clairvoyant – unless one counts (and one should be justified in doing so) those small everyday wonders that accompany a man of great patience and compassion and humility. But he had a keen mind and an open heart which won him many friends and admirers, and his extraordinary love was assuredly of the sort which goes in search of the one lost sheep or the one lost coin of Christ’s parables. Holy hierarch Raphael, faithful servant of Christ’s Church in New York and throughout North America, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion of Saint Raphael of Brooklyn, Tone 3:

Rejoice, O Father Raphael, Adornment of the holy Church!
Thou art Champion of the True Faith, Seeker of the lost,
Consolation of the oppressed, Father to orphans, and Friend of the poor,
Peacemaker and Good Shepherd, Joy of all the Orthodox,
Son of Antioch, Boast of America;
Intercede with Christ God for us and for all who honour thee.