A History of the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection of New York

Holy Virgin Protection Cathedral, New York, NY

Photo: Tagor Vojnovic

Part I: 1870-1943

by CRAIG TRUGLIA

Adapted from the 1993 article “Continuity of Life in Unityof Faith: A History of the Cathedral of the Holy VirginProtection of New York,” by Fr. Christopher Calin.

Located on East 2nd Street in Manhattan’s East Village, the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection of New York has been the seat of many archbishops and metropolitans since 1870. Its history is not simply that of a building or a singular parish—it is, in many ways, a microcosm of the Orthodox experience in America. One cannot tell this history without surveying how Orthodoxy began in New York, its many hurdles and bumps along the way, its saints and its sinners, and despite it all, the perseverance of New York’s Orthodox Christians.

This article will cover the beginnings of New York’s great Orthodox cathedral through 1943. Our next article will span from then up to the present day.

Part I: Orthodoxy makes its first in-roads in New York City

Orthodoxy is often viewed as a “missionary religion” in the United States, brought by immigrants from historically Orthodox homelands to new homes throughout the nation. In New York City, however, things began a little differently. Father Nicholas Bjerring, who founded the city’s first parish in 1870, was in fact a convert to Russian Orthodoxy.

Bjerring, who was born in Denmark, taught philosophy at a Roman Catholic seminary in Baltimore before he came to New York. He was first exposed to Orthodoxy by reading a scholarly journal called L’Union Chrétienne, edited by a French Jesuit convert. The catalyst for his conversion was the 1870 Roman Catholic council popularly called “Vatican I,” which officially dogmatized Papal infallibility. In response to the council, Bjerring wrote to Pope Pius IX in 1870, accusing the Roman Catholic Church of lacking true catholicity—in contrast, he said, to the Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Isidore of Saint Petersburg took notice, and about a month later, he ordained Bjerring to the Holy Diaconate and then to the priesthood in quick succession. Bjerring served his first Divine Liturgy in German at a chapel in Russia.

At the time, there were only a few Orthodox parishes in the United States outside of Alaska. Bjerring was tasked with opening the first Orthodox chapel in New York City. The Russian Orthodox Church did not have a Patriarch—it was under the firm control of the Imperial Russian state—and the political leaders wanted a church in New York for diplomatic reasons. The goal was to expose Americans and foreign dignitaries visiting New York to Russian culture.

In November of 1870, Bishop Paul of Alaska consecrated the parlor of Bjerring’s home at Second Avenue and 50th Street (now the site of a gastropub) for use as a chapel. This “house church” was named the Chapel of the Holy Trinity and remained active for about 15 years. Just as the Holy Synod planned, it was visited by multiple bishops and dignitaries from around the world. The feasts of the Church were regularly celebrated as were Russian and Greek civil holidays, according to the Julian “Old” Calendar.

While this small chapel may at first glance have seemed very foreign, it was also distinctly American. All the services held there were initially in English. An English translation of the Divine Liturgy had been approved by the Holy Synod and published in 1865. The translation was completed anonymously by Fr. Stephen G. Hatherly, himself also a convert and an Orthodox priest in England under the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

Saint Innocent of Alaska, the Metropolitan of Moscow, assisted the small parish in New York. He chose the best seminarians out of Saint Petersburg Academy to help serve with Bjerring. These included E.V. Smirnoff (who later became a chaplain in London) and A.I. Mikhailovsky and Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin (both of whom later taught at Saint Petersburg Academy).

In a travelogue of his time in America, Lopukhin described the parish as “not large but diversified.” Its membership comprised both Greeks and Russians, Serbs and Syrians, members of consulates, and recent immigrants to New York. Between 1870 and 1880, there were records of 55 baptisms, 12 marriages, 14 burials, and four receptions of converts to Orthodoxy.

The small church was a curiosity to clerics of all denominations as well as to the secular dignitaries who regularly visited—but this would prove to be the parish’s main purpose to its Russian financial supporters. When funding was withdrawn in 1885, Bjerring was asked to close the church and move to Saint Petersburg to teach in its academy. This apparently was so jarring to him that he later apostatized, first to Presbyterianism (where he took up social activism, at that time called by Protestants the “Social Gospel”), and later back to Roman Catholicism when the Presbyterian Church reneged on funding his activist efforts. He died a Roman Catholic layman in 1900.

Part II: An Orthodox resurgence and the Church of Saint Nicholas

Orthodoxy’s inauspicious beginnings in New York soon morphed into long-term success. At the time, no one knew that many of the men serving and passing through New York City’s church would later prove to be saints, venerated worldwide by the Orthodox faithful.

In 1895, the Holy Synod began taking seriously the increasing number of Russian immigrants settling in the city. The Synod established a church in rented rooms at Second Avenue and 78th Street, naming it the Russian Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Nicholas. The parish’s first rector, Fr. Evtikhiy Balanovich, returned to Russia after only one year. Its second priest, however, was none other than St. Alexander Hotovitsky.

Hotovitsky was a Russian immigrant from Volhynia, a tiny region in present-day Ukraine that was part of the Russian Empire. He was the son of a rector at Volhynia Theological Academy. After graduating from Saint Petersburg Academy in 1895, Hotovitsky was ordained a reader and attached to the Church of Saint Nicholas. After his ordination to the priesthood, Hotovitsky began raising funds to construct a permanent building for the parish. Considerable sums were donated by wealthy Russian citizens, including Saint Tsar Nicholas II.

Fr. Alexander also supported efforts to plant new parishes throughout the region. With his help, Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Church was founded in Yonkers in 1898 and St. Basil’s Russian Orthodox Church in Watervliet in 1901. He admonished the 19 men who were to form the Watervliet parish with the following words:

You are a mustard seed that shall rise and grow till its branches overshadow the Earth. You are a few, but this is the work of God. His smile is upon you and your children shall fill the Earth forever.

Hotovitsky laid the cornerstone at St. Basil’s later that year and would travel regularly from New York City to serve the Divine Liturgy there. He also assisted other new parishes in New Jersey, such as Three Saints Russian Orthodox Church in Garfield and Sts. Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Church in South River. By 1901 he had raised enough money to build a church at Fifth Avenue and 97th Street. Bishop Tikhon visited in 1901 to bless the cornerstone. By 1904, the Russian Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Nicholas became the Diocesan Cathedral (and therefore Bishop Tikhon’s see for his ministries in the United States). That same year, Fr. Raphael Hawaweeny (later known as St. Raphael of Brooklyn) was ordained a bishop at the cathedral so he could minister to all North America’s Arab parishes.

A few years later, in 1907, Bishop Tikhon returned to Russia, becoming Patriarch of Moscow. Before leaving, he said the following to the parishioners in New York City:

Forgive me my cathedral church. You are precious and dear to me. During my ministry as bishop you were created, during my ministry you were beautified,

Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow

Metropolitan Platon

St. Alexander Hotovitsky

and during my ministry you were made a cathedral. It may be that to those who have seen the magnificent cathedrals in Russia you seem small and poor; you do not sparkle with gold and silver and precious stones as do those temples. But for Orthodox Russians who have suffered long without a temple, you are a precious treasure.

Part III: A time of troubles

For the Orthodox Church in America, now growing rapidly, the future appeared very bright. However, things quickly changed with the advent of World War I, which set off a cascade of events that led to the Russian Revolution and, ultimately, the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.

Bishop Tikhon, who was by then the Patriarch of Moscow, was imprisoned by the Soviets in 1923. He was released later that year, but he was already ill, and he died in 1925. He is now venerated as a saint and remembered as a confessor of the faith. Hotovitsky, who followed Patriarch Tikhon back to Russia in 1914, was martyred — executed by firing squad in 1937. Leadership of the Church in America was intended to transition to Bishop Platon (Rozhdestvensky), who was ordained Metropolitan of North America before Patriarch Tikhon’s repose. However, he and the Church of Saint Nicholas itself were in a sense also casualties of the Russian Revolution.

Meanwhile, a reform movement that had splintered from the church in Russia was also expanding its influence in North America. The Renovationists, also known as The Living Church, distinguished themselves from the main body of Russian Christians in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, when they argued for liturgical reforms and took an accommodationist stance toward their country’s new regime. Against

the canons of the Church, they appointed Fr. John Kedrosky, a married priest from Connecticut, as a rival to Metropolitan Platon. The Renovationists moved to seize the Church of Saint Nicholas. In 1925, after a lengthy process of litigation that worked its way up to the New York Court of Appeals, the church was lost to the schismatics.

Dispossessed of his cathedral, Metropolitan Platon accepted an offer from the Episcopalians to hold services at St. Augustine’s Chapel on East Houston Street. At this time, the Lower East Side had one of the largest concentrations of Russians in America. In fact, most of St. Nicholas’s parishioners lived closer to the Episcopal church than their own church uptown.

St. Augustine’s Chapel became, in effect, America’s new Orthodox cathedral. Archpriest (and future Metropolitan) Leonid Turkevich, who is now being considered for canonization, served the first Divine Liturgy there in 1926. On Palm Sunday of that year, the Episcopalians allowed the Orthodox community to consecrate part of the chapel as their own cathedral. By one account, they installed a soundproof wall to mark the boundary. These makeshift accommodations would hold them over until 1943, when they would buy the building of the Olivet Memorial German Reformed Church, two blocks up the road.

[continued next issue]

CRAIG TRUGLIA is a civil servant living in Syracuse, New York. He is a parishioner at Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church, which is part of the Bulgarian Patriarchate. He blogs at OrthodoxChristianTheology.com.