Raphael of Brooklyn

Saint Raphael of Brooklyn
Portrait of St. Raphael
Bishop, Archimandrite and Vicar of Brooklyn and all America
Born	Raphael Hawaweeny (1860-11-20)November 20, 1860 Beirut, Ottoman Syria
Died	February 27, 1915(1915-02-27) (aged 54) Brooklyn, New York City
Venerated in	Eastern Orthodox Church
Canonized	March 2000 by Patriarchate of Antioch
Major shrine	Antiochian Orthodox Cathedral of Brooklyn, Little Syria, Manhattan
Feast	27 February (OCA), First Saturday in November (Antiochian)
Patronage	America
Influences	Joseph of Damascus, Innocent of Alaska
Tradition or genre	Orthodox Christian Mission

Raphael of Brooklyn (Arabic: القديس رفائيل من بروكلين, lit. 'āl-Qidīs Rafāʾīl min Brūklīn', born Raphael Hawaweeny; Arabic: رفائيل الهواويني, romanized: Rafāʾīl Hawāwīnī; November 20, 1860 – February 27, 1915), was bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, auxiliary bishop of Brooklyn, vicar of the Northern-American diocese, and head of the Antiochian Syrian Christian mission. Known as "Brooklyn's Only Saint", he is best known for having been the first Orthodox Christian bishop of America, for his staunch critiques of ethnophyletism, exclusivism and Greek nepotism in the Orthodox church, as well as being influential to the Arab Orthodox Movement and being among the first to integrate the Orthodox Church into multimedia with the first-ever published Orthodox Magazine.

Life

Early life

He was born in modern-day Lebanon to Damascene Syrian Arab (Antiochian Greek Christian) parents of the Orthodox faith who had come to Beirut fleeing the 1860 Syrian Civil War in Damascus. He received his education at the Damascus Patriarchal School, which had become the leading Greek Orthodox institution of higher learning in the Levant under the leadership of St. Joseph of Damascus, who was martyred while trying to defend the Bab Tauma. After being tonsured a Monk, St. Raphael went on to further his study of Christian theology at the Patriarchal Halki seminary in Constantinople, and at the Theological Academy in Kiev, Russian Empire (now Kyiv, Ukraine).

Conflict with Greek Ethnophyletism in Syria

Archimandrite Raphael upon his arrival in America

As the 19th century wore on and native Arabs suffered under the rule of what they viewed as Greek intruders, it was discovered that St. Raphael himself had written polemics under a pseudonym against the bribed ethnic exclusivism of the Greek clergy in the church (especially of the 'despised' Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre), these writings were granted canonical release in the Russian Orthodox Church and the ROCOR.

Excommunication to Russia

All of this combined with his involvement with the Arab Orthodox Movement, lead to his excommunication from the Greek Orthodox Church and subsequent welcoming by the Russian Church, who were in support of the Arab Orthodox; he then served as a professor at the Kazan Theological Academy, and was commissioned to write anti-Islamic apologetics.

During his stay in the Russian Empire, the situation in the Vilayet of Syria was close to escalating: the ruling Greek minority made a claim to Ottoman officials "that there was no Arab fit to assume the office of patriarch, because the Arabs as a whole were under Russian influence.” Hawaweeny's stay in Russia only went on to solidify this claim. The Ottoman administration duly appointed Spyridon of Antioch, another Greek, who was remembered for "threatening to arrest two priests who did not commemorate him liturgically (in Greek)", he ended up being so hated that “the Arabs refused to have anything to do with him, [even] burying their dead unblessed.”

Missionary activities in America

While St. Raphael stayed in touch and in support of the cause, after his tenure in Russia, he was sent to be a missionary to New York City in 1895 by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia to administer the local Orthodox Christian community which then included mainly Russian, Greek, Romanian and Arab immigrants, responding specifically to a request by local Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians for a priest who could minister to them in their own language.

"I am an Arab by birth, a Greek by education, with a Slavic heart, a Russian soul and an American citizenship"

— Raphel of Brooklyn

In 1902, St. Raphael acquired a former Swedish Lutheran Church on Pacific Street in Brooklyn, which was then called "St. Nicholas Cathedral" thus beginning his abide in America; the chapel has since moved, though remains the primatial see of the Antiochian Metropolitan in America, Fr. Saba Esber.

Hawaweeny after having been declared "Syrian-Arabian Vicar of America"

From 1903 onwards, after having been elected the "Syria-Arabian Vicariot of America", he began his notoriously ambitious missionary journey, wherein he adopted a semi-nomadic lifestyle, in which he was known to have travelled by foot, by horse, by donkey and by train among freighthopping tramps and hobos, even having went so far as to extend his mission to Cuba, the Caribbean and Yucatán, Mexico towards the end; during his travels, he organized his journey around letters he received from scattered Orthodox Christians in America, and would use them as a guideline for his travels, coming in-and-out of cities to perform spontaneous baptisms, marriages and blessings.

"At 9 PM with 15 people with me on four horse-drawn carriages, we departed for our journey (west of Omaha). The weather was beautiful, the road was even, and it was a full moon. My companions enjoyed it so much that the entire trip they were singing church and national songs.

We arrived at the house of our farmers at about one in the morning. From all the noises and firing from handguns, the farmers ran out from their house and learned that their priest has arrived, and they were so overjoyed that, with tears and thanksgiving, they embraced us and kissed my hands, and my feet, thanking the Lord God, who granted them to see an Orthodox priest after seven years without one. Truthfully, we all cried as well, seeing such joyous greetings from them. We all stayed in one room. From exhaustion, some started falling asleep on their chairs, others on the floor, and I was offered a small couch. In the morning everyone, with piety, attended the Matins service.

After that, I served the Blessing of Waters and blessed the house and their entire farm. Having spent the entire day there, we returned to Kearney, Nebraska in the evening. The next day, this farmer with his whole family and the brother, came to Divine Liturgy for the baptism of their children."

— Raphael Hawaweeny, Missionary Journal

In 1904, he became the first Orthodox bishop to be consecrated in North America; the consecration was performed in New York City by Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin) and Bishop Innocent (Pustynsky). He served as Bishop of Brooklyn until his death. During the course of his ministry as an auxiliary bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in America, Raphael founded the present-day St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Cathedral (Brooklyn), established thirty parishes, built over 30 Churches and assisted in the founding of St. Tikhon's Orthodox Monastery.

In 1909, Fr. Raphael briefly struggled with United States Immigration Enforcement, due to a brief classification of Syrian-Arabs as "Asian" rather than "White", having possibly faced deportation, this was all cleared up in part thanks to the help of former enemy of St. Raphael, Naoum Mokarzel.

When St. Raphael was 45 years old, his missionary work had put a great strain on his body, though he continued, Father Raphael founded the official magazine of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese, The Word, in 1905 in Arabic (الكلمة) to help guide his missionary activities, writing many works of his own, a lot of which remain both untranslated and unpublished.

Funeral of St. Raphael of Brooklyn

At only 54 years old, St. Raphael started showing signs of weakness from all his years of missionary work not long after he returned to New York, as by the end of 1914, he was bedridden. On February 27, 1915, the great bishop had died, Syrian priests streamed into Brooklyn in the days following St. Raphael’s funeral, and gathered together.

Assassination Attempt and the Battle of Pacific Street

Background information

In 1905, New York’s Syrians were divided into two main camps Orthodox and Maronite. Each group had a corresponding newspaper: "Meraat-ul-Gharb" for the Orthodox, and "Al-Hoda" for the Maronites. The papers were engaged in a war of words, and slanderous articles appeared in both. Finally, St. Raphael could stand no more of it, and he called for the editors to stop publishing. The Al-Hoda crowd, which called itself the “Champagne Glass Club,” tried to shut him up, saying that “his place was in the church” (New York Sun, 8/27/1905).

In speaking up, St. Raphael made himself a target, causing Al-Hoda‘s editor, Syrian-American writer, social critic and lebanese nationalist Naoum Mokarzel, to take direct aim at the bishop. He accused St. Raphael of trying to incite the Orthodox against the Maronites. Meraat-Ul Gharb responded on St. Raphael's behalf, and the back-and-forth attacks continued. Rather than stopping the battle, St. Raphael’s intervention unwittingly made things worse.

"We held a meeting in the basement of the church so that I could calm and restrain my people. I wanted the members of my church to ignore the men who [were slandering] me. I wanted to advise them to keep their tempers and do nothing to any enemy of mine. I told them that I had forgiven Maluf and Markozel and that [Meerat-Ul Gharb] must forgive them. I begged them to keep peace and to have nothing but brotherly love in their hearts."

— Raphael Hawaweeny, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (8/28/1905)

In response, the police seems to have been more amused than anything else by all this intra-Arab bickering:

"The big seargent behind the desk of the Church street police station last night smiled at the idea of bloodshed, and said that no extra police had been placed in the Syrian Quarter, though the men on post had been told to exercise vigilance."

— NYPD, The Sun (8/28/1905)

For the next few weeks, the Syrian community was balanced on the edge of a knife. The war of words continued in the papers, to the point that most Syrian men tried to forbid their wives from reading them. The police seemed to think that this was harmless, and even amusing until September 15, when about 20 Orthodox and Catholic Syrian men, came to blows in the business center of the Syrian enclave. Only one shot was fired, and missed its target, an Orthodox bystander by the name of Abousamra. A policeman rushed into the scuffle, breaking up the fight and arresting three men.

Motif

The main issue is generally characterized as having been a conflict between secular Lebanese nationalism and Orthodox Christianity in Lebanon. In 1905, there was no state called “Lebanon” and today’s Lebanon and Syria were at that time the Vilayet of Syria, thus still part of the Ottoman Empire. But Naoum Mokarzel was among the first to aim to change that, being a passionate a Lebanese nationalist as there ever has been, and to a certain extent directly instrumental in the eventual establishment of the Lebanese state.

Since Lebanese nationalism was far more sympathetic to Maronites than to the Orthodox, Mokarzel is believed to have felt that St. Raphael’s tolerance of the Ottomans and loyalty to the Russians was a betrayal of his heritage. To Mokarzel and his followers, all things had to be parcel of the ideal of Lebanon; to St. Raphael, dedication to one’s faith always trumped the idea of nationalism.

Incident

On August 17th 1905, St. Raphael went out to visit Abousamra, who lived in the same building as Naoum Mokarzel. For his part, when hearing that St. Raphael's entourage went out to visit Abousamra, Mokarzel had invited a dozen friends over, all of them members of the Champagne Glass Club, with at least some of these friends were presumed to have been armed.

"The minute the Hawaweeny party entered [Mokarzel’s house] the fight began. It was rough and tumble in the parlor for a few minutes, and then the combatants went to the street and fought there."

— New York Times (9/19/1905)

Fr. Raphael escaped the scene and remained unharmed, nobody was injured or killed and Hawaweeny and Mokarzel eventually made up sometime later, though the same cannot be said for all parties involved.

Glorification and honors

St. Raphael as part of an Iconostasis, with two Angels to the east and west, representing the "Herd of the scattered sheep in America"

Bishop Raphael was originally buried in New York until August 1988, when his relics were translated to the Antiochian Village Camp in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, on property of the Antiochian Archdiocese, along with several other bishops and clergy.

Raphael was glorified by the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) in its March 2000 session. He is commemorated by the OCA on February 27, the anniversary of his death and by the Antiochian Orthodox Church on the first Saturday of November near the Synaxis of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and all the bodiless powers of heaven.

In 2015, the Antiochian Orthodox Church, the OCA and ROCOR celebrated the 100th Anniversary of the repose of St. Raphael.

He is commemorated on 14 February and on 27 October - Synaxis of All Saints of Kiev Theological Academy and Kiev Theological Seminary in Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Writings

• "The Antiochian Patriarchal Metochion in Moscow and the Ascension and St. Hypatios Church" (1891)
• "Historical Glance at the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre" (1893)
• "A Historical view of the errors of the Papal Church" (1895)
• "A Brief history of the Christian Church" (1895)
• "A Refutation of the Proclamation of Pope Leo XIII" (1895)
• "The book of true consolation and the divine prayers" (1898)
• "The Resumé of the Church and the Cemetery projects" (1903)
• "The Great Euchologion" (1913)
• "The Small Euchologion" (1913)
• "Truths of the holy Tradition and their great axioms", Al-Kalimat (1905-1915)
• "Rules for the second year", Al-Kalimat (1905-1915)
• Various others, Al-Kalimat (1905-1915)

See also

• St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Cathedral (Brooklyn)
• Saint Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral, New York

References

• "Christian Church to be Filled by a Damascus Preacher" (The New York Times, Sept 15, 1895)

External links

• Bishop Raphael’s New Attitude (1912)