Saint Raphael of Brooklyn

Saint Raphael Hawaweeny was born in 1860 to a Syrian Orthodox family who had fled the massacres in Damascus and taken refuge in Beirut. From childhood he was drawn to the Church; gifted and devout, he studied in Lebanon, then in Constantinople, and finally at the theological academy of Kiev in Russia, becoming a master of Arabic, Greek, Russian, and other tongues. Ordained and raised to the rank of archimandrite, he served the Arab Orthodox community living in Russia.

In 1895 he was sent to the United States to care for the Syrian and Arab Orthodox immigrants scattered across America, who had come seeking work and had no priest of their own and no church in their language. He found them in tenements and mill towns, lonely and far from home, and he became their shepherd. Tirelessly he crossed and re-crossed the continent — by his own account traveling many thousands of miles — visiting the faithful in dozens of cities, celebrating the services, baptizing, marrying, burying, and organizing communities where there had been none.

He labored to give his people a home in the New World. He published service books in Arabic, including the first Orthodox service book printed in America, and gathered his scattered flock into parishes. In 1904, in New York, he was consecrated Bishop of Brooklyn — the first Orthodox bishop ever consecrated in North America. Under Saint Tikhon, then the ruling hierarch in America, Raphael became a pillar of the young multi-ethnic mission, overseeing the Syro-Arab communities while serving all who came to him, of whatever background.

He was known for his humility and fatherly care, and for his insistence that his people remain faithful to Orthodoxy amid the pressures of a new land. He called himself a debtor to all, and warned his flock against abandoning the Church of their fathers. By the end of his life he had established some thirty parishes and a network of clergy, laying the foundation of what would become the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.

Worn out by his labors, Saint Raphael reposed on February 27, 1915, mourned by Orthodox Christians of every nationality; his funeral drew great throngs. In the year 2000 he was glorified together by the Orthodox Church in America and the Antiochian Archdiocese, and his relics were enshrined at the Antiochian Village in Pennsylvania. Beloved as “the Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep in America,” he is honored as a model bishop and missionary, who sought out the forgotten and gave them both Christ and a Church to call their own.

Saint Raphael’s love crossed every national line. Though sent first to the Arabic-speaking faithful, he served Russians, Greeks, and all who had no priest, laboring under the single Orthodox mission in America of his day, before the later divisions among the immigrant churches. In this he remains a sign and a prayer for the unity of Orthodox Christians on this continent. His writings, his many parishes, and above all his self-giving love endure as his legacy, and his relics still draw pilgrims who find in him a tender and tireless intercessor.