- Era
- 1860–1915
- Region
- Syria, Lebanon, Constantinople, Russia, and North America
- Category
- Missionary bishop, pastor, educator, and church-builder
- Feast
- February 27
Jump to A Child of Displacement Finding the Scattered Flock Bishop on American Soil Why the Church Remembers Him What His Life Asks of Us
A Child of Displacement
Raphael was born Rafla Hawaweeny in Beirut in 1860. His parents had fled Damascus during violence in which Christians, including St. Joseph of Damascus, were killed. The family later returned home, and Rafla was educated for service in the Church of Antioch.
He studied at the Patriarchal school in Damascus, the Theological School of Halki, and the Kyiv Theological Academy. After ordination, he served the Antiochian representation in Moscow and later taught Arabic in Kazan. His outspoken advocacy for native Arab leadership in the Patriarchate of Antioch brought conflict and suspension, later resolved. The episode revealed both his courage and the intensity with which questions of language, leadership, and ecclesial identity were felt.
In 1895 the Syrian Orthodox Benevolent Society invited him to care for Arab Orthodox immigrants in New York. He crossed the Atlantic as an archimandrite and immediately began organising a chapel and searching for families scattered far beyond the city.
Finding the Scattered Flock
Raphael travelled repeatedly through the United States, Canada, and Mexico. He visited great cities, mining towns, farms, and isolated homes, often celebrating the Divine Liturgy wherever a room could be prepared. He baptized, married, heard confessions, reconciled quarrelling communities, founded parishes, and recruited priests.
This ministry answered a painful immigrant reality. Families had arrived without nearby Orthodox churches; their children increasingly spoke English; and distances could leave the sick or dying without sacramental care. Raphael served Arabic-speaking Christians while also ministering to Greeks, Russians, and others.
He published an Arabic service book and in 1905 founded Al-Kalimat—The Word—to teach and connect communities he could not constantly visit. Recognising the needs of a new generation, he encouraged English in worship and religious education and supported Isabel Hapgood’s English service book.
Bishop on American Soil
St. Tikhon saw that the expanding diocese required bishops attentive to its different peoples. In 1904 Tikhon and Bishop Innocent consecrated Raphael as Bishop of Brooklyn at St. Nicholas Cathedral. Raphael thereby became the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in North America.
His consecration did not isolate Arab believers into a self-contained ethnic church. He remained a vicar within a multiethnic diocese and worked beside Tikhon, Alexis Toth, Alexander Hotovitzky, John Kochurov, and many unnamed clergy and laity. At the same time, he defended the liturgical, linguistic, and pastoral needs of his own flock.
By his death from heart disease in 1915, the Syro-Arab mission included about thirty parishes and 25,000 faithful. The Orthodox Church in America glorified him in 2000.
Why the Church Remembers Him
Raphael’s episcopacy was lived on trains, ships, muddy roads, and borrowed floors. He understood a bishop not as a distant administrator but as a shepherd who searches for people before they disappear from view.
His work joined continuity and adaptation. Immigrants needed the faith carried in beloved words and customs; their children also needed an Orthodox home in the language they actually spoke.
What His Life Asks of Us
Raphael asks who remains unseen at the edges of our parishes: newcomers, isolated families, people without transport, and children who cannot understand the language of worship. Pastoral care begins by finding them.
He also asks us to hold ethnic inheritance as a gift offered to the whole Church, not a wall. Christ gathers peoples without erasing them.
Holy Father Raphael, pray that Christ may comfort refugees, guide bishops and parish builders, unite Orthodox Christians in North America, and teach us to seek those who are scattered.
A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.
- Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn — Orthodox Church in America
- St. Raphael Hawaweeny, articles and pastoral writings in Al-Kalimat (The Word)
- Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America — The Life of St. Raphael
- The proclamation and services for his glorification, May 2000
The same Gospel, a week at a time
The saints spent their lives inside these passages. Words for the Narrow Way takes one saying of Christ and gives it seven days — the passage in full, what the Greek is doing, how the Fathers read it, and one practice to carry through the week.