Eastern Orthodoxy in North America
The vast majority of Eastern Orthodox Christians in North America are in the U.S. and have roots in countries with current or historically large Orthodox communities, including those of Russian, Greek, Ukrainian, Albanian, Macedonian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Georgian, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, Palestinian, Israeli, and Egyptian ancestry; a growing number of adherents come from other Eastern European and Middle Eastern countries and from minorities of converted Americans and Canadians of Western European, African, Latin American, South Asian, East Asian, and South East Asian descent.
The headquarters of this North American Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church was moved from Alaska to California around the mid-19th century.
This movement, which increased the numbers of Eastern Orthodox Christians in America, resulted from a conflict between John Ireland, the politically powerful Roman Catholic Archbishop of Saint Paul, Minnesota; and Alexis Toth, an influential Ruthenian Catholic priest.
Archbishop Ireland's refusal to accept Toth's credentials as a priest induced Toth to join the Eastern Orthodox Church, and further resulted in the conversion of tens of thousands of other Uniate Catholics in North America to the Eastern Orthodox Church, under his guidance and inspiration.
These Uniates were received into Eastern Orthodoxy into the existing North American diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Under the aegis of this diocese, which at the turn of the 20th century was ruled by Bishop (and future Patriarch) Tikhon, Eastern Orthodox Christians of various ethnic backgrounds were ministered to, both non-Russian and Russian; a Syro-Arab mission was established in the episcopal leadership of Saint Raphael of Brooklyn, who was the first Eastern Orthodox bishop to be consecrated in America.
One of the effects of the persecution and administrative chaos wreaked on the Russian Orthodox Church by the Bolshevik Revolution was a flood of refugees from Russia to the United States, Canada, and Europe.
The Revolution of 1917 severed large sections of the Russian church—dioceses in America, Japan, and Manchuria, as well as refugees in Europe—from regular contact with the mother church.
A group of bishops who had left their sees in Russia gathered in Sremski Karlovci, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and adopted a clearly political monarchist stand.
This group, which to this day includes a sizable portion of the Russian emigration, was formally dissolved in 1922 by Patriarch Tikhon, who then appointed metropolitans Platon and Evlogy as ruling bishops in America and Europe, respectively.
After World War II the patriarchate of Moscow made unsuccessful attempts to regain control over these groups.
[4] However, recognition of this autocephalic status is not universal, as the Ecumenical Patriarch (under whom is the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America) and some other jurisdictions have not officially accepted it.
The patriarchate of Moscow thereby renounced its former canonical claims in the United States and Canada; it also acknowledged an autonomous church established in Japan that same year.
Adherents of Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Canada traditionally belong to several ethnic communities and ecclesiastical jurisdictions (canonical and noncanonical).
