[4] He held the title Bishop of Brooklyn from 1917 to April 1933, founded and led the American Orthodox Catholic Church for six years, and is, perhaps, best known as being the source of various lines of succession of episcopi vagantes.

Ofiesh, a graduate of the Middle Eastern Orthodox Ecclesiastical Seminary in 1898, assisted Bishop Gabriel Shatilla in Beirut where he was tonsured as a monk, and ordained into the diaconate.

[8] In 1932, Archbishop Aftimios was invited to come to St. Mary's Syrian Orthodox Church in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to arbitrate a dispute regarding the transfer of its priest, Fr.

With the subsequent withdrawal of support for the American Orthodox Catholic Church, it lost any meaningful chance at resolving its disputed status.

Relations between the small jurisdiction created by Aftimios and the mainstream Eastern Orthodox Church were not regularized following his marriage and de facto deposition from the episcopacy.

Since that time, numerous and still multiplying lines of succession of episcopi vagantes continue to persist which all trace their roots to Aftimios (mainly through Ignatius Nichols),[12] many of whom regard him as a saint.

[13][14] Some of those bishops are married men, as well, which is a continual stumbling block to their unity with the mainstream Orthodox Church that has, for centuries, maintained a celibate episcopacy.

The book by Aftimios's widow, while including a great deal of historical information, is not mainly a scholarly work but is, rather, a biography aimed toward the exoneration of her late husband.