The Orthodox Church in America (OCA) is an Eastern Orthodox Christian church based in North America. The OCA consists of more than 680 parishes, missions, communities, monasteries and institutions in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In 2020, it had an estimated 74,415 members in the United States. In 2015, the OCA claimed 900,000 baptized members.
The OCA has its origins in a mission established by eight Russian Orthodox monks in Alaska, then part of Russian America, in 1794. This grew into a full diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church named the Diocese of Alaska and Aleutines with the Cathedral in Sitka (founded by Russians with the name of Novoarkhangelsk). The first Orthodox missionary bishop was in 1840 Saint Innocent of Alaska. After the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, the diocese was granted jurisdiction for all North America and the see moved to San Francisco between 1872 and 1903, and later in New York City after 1903. By the late 19th century, the Russian Orthodox Church had grown in other areas of the United States due to the arrival of immigrants from areas of Eastern and Central Europe, many of them formerly of the Eastern Catholic Churches ("Greek Catholics"), and from the Middle East. These immigrants, regardless of nationality or ethnic background, were united under a single North American diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow (previously Bishop of the Diocese of Alaska and Aleutines, named in 1900 also Bishop of all North America) directed all Russian Orthodox churches outside of Russia to govern themselves autonomously. Orthodox churches in America became a self-governing Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in America in 1924 under the leadership of Metropolitan Platon (Rozhdestvensky), popularly called the Metropolia (from ). The Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in America was granted autocephaly by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1970, and renamed the Orthodox Church in America. Its hierarchs are part of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America. While the OCA is in full communion with most Eastern Orthodox churches in the world, the OCA's autocephaly is not fully recognized.
Unlike most Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States, the OCA does not have an affinity towards any particular foreign nationality, but most OCA members are ethnically Euro-American, and most OCA clergy are Americans. However, the OCA does have other minority ethnic dioceses for Romanian, Bulgarian, and Albanian immigrants. Additionally, as a consequence of history, certain ethnic groups (particularly Russian Americans, Ruthenian Americans and Alaska Natives) are disproportionately represented in the OCA compared to the general population. Liturgical and church traditions, such as forms of singing, liturgics, vestments, iconography, use of Church Slavonic, and architecture broadly reflect those of Russian Orthodoxy.
The OCA states that currently the Russian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Polish, Serbian, and Czech and Slovak churches recognize the autocephaly of the OCA. Among the churches that do not recognize it is the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which argues that the Russian Church did not have the authority to grant autocephaly, partly because the Russian Church at the time was considered to be heavily influenced by the Soviet government. The Ecumenical Patriarch also cites Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon, which asserted the jurisdiction of the bishop of Constantinople in dioceses located "among the barbarians" (i.e. outside the Roman Empire) as the source of the Ecumenical Patriarchate's authority in the matter. As a result of this, the Ecumenical Patriarchate offers the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America ("GOArch") as an alternative for orthodox Americans. The remaining churches do not recognize the OCA as autocephalous, although they do recognize the self-governing nature of the church. While the subject of political and ecclesiastical dispute, this controversy does not impair the communion between the OCA and the wider Eastern Orthodox Church.
Official name According to the April 1970 Tomos of Autocephaly granted by the Russian Orthodox Church, the official name of the church is The Autocephalous Orthodox Church in America. The more comprehensive March 1970 Agreement of Tomos of Autocephaly, however, states in Article VIII that the legal name of the church was changed to Orthodox Church in America (the Russian language does not use the grammatical articles).
History Missionary work The first Eskaleut peoples to become Eastern Orthodox Christians were the Aleuts living in contact with Siberian fur traders in the mid 18th century. They had been baptized mostly by their Eastern Orthodox trading partners or during occasional visits by priests serving aboard exploring vessels of the Russian navy. A Russian colony in Alaska was established in 1784 by merchant Grigory Shelikhov. Shelikhov's attempt to colonize Kodiak Island was met with resistance by the native population. He returned to Russia and installed Alexandr Baranov as director of the colony. In order to convince the Russian imperial court of the seriousness of his colonial ambitions, Shelikhov recruited volunteers from the Valaam Monastery, an environment that appears strikingly similar to the Kodiak archipelago's landscape, as well as the Konevsky Monastery, to travel to the new colony.
The volunteers, led by Archimandrite Joasaph Bolotov, departed Saint Petersburg on December 21, 1793, and arrived at Kodiak Island on September 24, 1794. When they arrived, they were shocked by the harsh treatment of the Kodiak natives at the hands of the Russian settlers and Baranov. They sent reports to Shelikhov detailing the abuse of the local population, but were ignored. In response, however, the Holy Synod created an auxiliary episcopal see in Alaska in 1796, and elected Fr. Joasaph as bishop. Fr. Joasaph and a small party returned to Russia in 1798 for his consecration and to offer first-hand accounts of what they had seen. During their return voyage to the colony in May 1799, their ship sank and all aboard died. In 1800, Baranov placed the remaining monks under house arrest and forbade them to have any further contact with the local population.
Despite the lack of leadership, the Eastern Orthodox mission in Alaska continued to grow. In 1811, however, the Holy Synod officially closed the episcopal see. It was not until 1823 that the Holy Synod sent instructions for a new priest to travel to Alaska. John Veniaminov of Irkutsk volunteered for the journey, and left Russia in May 1823. He and his family arrived at Unalaska Island on July 29, 1824. In 1840, after the death of his wife, Veniaminov accepted monastic tonsure and, taking the name Innocent, ordination as the Bishop of Kamchatka, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands, making him the first ruling bishop of the Alaskan mission since Bishop Joasaph. Bishop Innocent was elevated to archbishop in 1850 (he became in 1868 Metropolitan of Moscow). For his missionary and scholarly work that had focused on blending indigenous Alaskan languages and cultures with Orthodox tradition, Innocent became a saint of the Eastern Orthodox Church in America in 1977, and is referred to as the Enlightener of the Aleuts and Apostle to the Americas.
Growth In 1868, the first Orthodox church in the contiguous United States was established in San Francisco, California. From the late 19th century until World War I, there was a wave of immigration to the U.S. Within this wave of new people, were immigrants from traditionally Orthodox Christian regions of the world. There were many immigrants from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, who formed the backbone of the diocese. Numerous parishes were established across the country throughout the rest of the 19th century. Although these parishes were typically multi-ethnic, most received support from the missionary diocese. In 1872 the diocesan see was relocated from Alaska to the city of San Francisco, California in the United States. The mission itself was instituted as a separate Diocese of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands on June 10, 1870, subsequent to the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. In November 1870, the first Eastern Orthodox church in New York City was consecrated.
Eastern Catholicism was viewed with suspicion by several Latin Church bishops in the United States; some, such as Archbishop John Ireland of Saint Paul, Minnesota, were actually hostile, especially concerning the matter of married clergy. In 1891, Alexis Toth—a Slovak-born Ruthenian Catholic priest rejected by Bishop Ireland—brought a group of 361 Eastern Catholics into Eastern Orthodoxy. From then until his death in 1909, Toth brought approximately 20,000 Eastern Catholics from 65 independent communities to Eastern Orthodoxy. By 1917, 163 Eastern Catholic parishes consisting of more than 100,000 faithful had been converted. For his efforts, Toth was glorified as a saint by the OCA in 1994.
In recognition of the expansion of the church beyond Alaska, Bishop Tikhon (Belavin) petitioned the Holy Synod to change the diocese's title to the Diocese of the Aleutians and North America. This was approved in February 1900. He consecrated Innocent (Pustynsky) as auxiliary bishop for Alaska in 1903, and in 1904 he consecrated Raphael Hawaweeny to administer to the Arab parishes. In 1905, Bishop Tikhon relocated the diocesan administration from San Francisco to New York City.
In a report to the Holy Synod that year, Bishop Tikhon proposed dramatic changes in the operation of the diocese. Recognizing the needs of the growing multi-ethnic Orthodox community, he recommended reforming the missionary diocese into a self-supporting American diocese, composed of numerous ethnic auxiliary dioceses. His plan called for Russian (New York), Arab (Brooklyn), Serbian (Chicago), and Greek dioceses. Additionally, he called for the formation of a governing council, composed of clergy and laity, which would meet to discuss administrative and canonical issues. On March 5, 1907, the first All-American Sobor convened in Mayfield, Pennsylvania. Following Archbishop Tikhon's reassignment to Russia that year, however, few of his reforms were implemented.
During this period, education and charity was a focus of the diocese. In 1905, Archbishop Tikhon oversaw the creation of an Eastern Orthodox seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota. St. Platon's Seminary moved from Minneapolis to Tenafly, New Jersey, in 1912 and enrolled 78 students from then until 1923. In 1916, an unaccredited Russian women's college was established in Brooklyn. An immigrant society and orphanage also were established, as well as the first Orthodox monasteries in the United States (Saint Tikhon's Monastery for men in 1905 and Holy Virgin Protection for women in 1915).
By 1917, the American diocese was the largest in the Russian Orthodox Church. It had grown from ten parishes in 1890 to more than 350. Most of the funding for the diocese was provided by Russian Church, via the Imperial Missionary Society. The connections between the American diocese and the Russian Church would be severely compromised by the events of that year.
Revolution and turmoil
The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent establishment of the Communist Soviet government ushered in a period of repression for the Russian Orthodox Church. Church property was confiscated and, when Patriarch Tikhon resisted, he was imprisoned from April 1922 until June 1923. On November 20, 1920, Patriarch Tikhon formally authorized Russian Orthodox bishops to set up temporarily independent organizations, until such time as normal communications with and governance from the patriarchate could be restored.