Fr. George said:
The young fogey said:
Since the Russians were here first, the OCA's the canonical Orthodox church.
So because they were in Alaska but nowhere else, they claim the whole continent? NOLA would disagree strenuously...
NOLA?
New Orleans, Lousiania, i.e. Holy Trinity Cathedral? If that, Father-
nice parish, but it has no room to complain.
Even if they were in Alaska "but nowhere else," that's more than anyone else. Fact is, the Russian connection started in colonial Virginia, where Philip Ludwell III, having been received by the Chapel of the Russian Embassy in London in 1738, returned home (with the blessing of the Holy Synod for translating the Orthodox Confession of Met. St. Peter Movila/Mogilas and the Divine Liturgy of St. John)-his grandfather Philip I had served as the first governor of the Carolinas, his father as 24th Speaker of the Virginia House of Burgess, President of the Viriginia Council and rector of William and Mary College. His mother was buried in the churchyard of the church in the old capital of Jamestown, his grandfather Philip I and his brother Thomas being responsible for bringing the capital to Williamsburg, near their plantations. In return the town named it church Bruton, after their hometown in England.
As for Philip Ludwell III, he gave George Washington his original military commission and brought over Thomas Jefferson's face in law as a lad. He built his house across the road going to the governor's palace from the Bruton parish, on the main street of "The Duke of Glouchester" which ran to the House of Burgess.
Philip also had the blessing to take the Eucharist from the London Chapel to his home in VA, where he raised his daughters Orthodox. From there his translation of the "Orthodox Confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Eastern-Church" was finished and published in 1762
http://orthodoxhistory.org/2013/06/25/an-unexpected-discovery-concerning-philip-ludwell-iii/
Ludwell changing the family crest from single headed eagles to double headed ones
The home passed to his daughter Lucy, also Orthdoox, who married John Paradise, another Orthodox Englishman-but Greek, he was born of a half-Greek mother in Thessalonica, where his Orthodox English father served as British consul: John Paradise taught Ancient Greek to Thomas Jefferson. When the War of American Independence broke out, Lucy was abroad with her husband in Europe, and their home in Williamsburg was seized. The Ludwells, however, were well acquainted with Benjamin Franklin (Philip III has commissioned Franklin's favorite portrait of himself), who came to Paris to seek aid for the Revolutionaries. There, as plenipotentiary of the United Stated of America, he swore John Paradise as a citizen-perhaps the first US naturalization, in October 1780. But John also retained links to England-he was close friends with Frederick North (who had been secretly baptized Orthodox in Corfu), son of the British Prime Minister. Both would later work as lobbyist for Russian interests.
John passed away and in her widowhood Lucy wrote Jefferson, now in his second term in the White House (Aug 27, 1805), in reply to his inquiry on her health “With the blessing of God I am now in good health, and with my priest’s blessing and command who is the Rev. Mr. Smirnov" the priest of the Russian Embassy Chapel in London. She passed away, evidently still in the Faith, 9 years later in Virginia.
By then the Russians had already extended their mission from Alaska down into California and set up Fort Ross, dedicating it on Czar Alexander I's names day September 10th, 1812. The reader's services culminate in 1825 in the sailors setting up the Fort's Chapel.
besides bringing converted Aleuts, they began to convert the local Kashaya and other Amerindians. They also had Hawaiians in the early years-the Russians having built a two chapels in Hawaii, closed by Calvinist missionaries in 1820 (a tiny embassy chapel was built in 1882 in Honolulu). Besides being served by naval chaplains-the officers of the Russian American Company had to be naval men-it was served by the Alaskan mission, e.g. Fr. Ioan Venianimov-later Met. St. Innocent of Alaska, who visited it and the Mexican California missions in 1836. When the Company decided to close down the colony-by then covering an area the size of Delaware-in 1840, Fr. Ioan, then taking vows to be consecrated bishop of the See of New Archangel/Sitka, bemoaned the withdrawal and had the Holy Synod evaculate all the Amerindian Orthodox. Over half a century later [St.] Sebastian Dabovich, the first European native born American archimandrite and priest-he was born in 18 as his immigrating parents were entering San Francisco Bay-noted meeting the California Kashaya and Miwok Orthodox in Sitka. The Governor Kostromitinov, now Russian Government agent, moved to San Franciso where the Russian American Company moved its headquarters for CA. At his apartment, navel chaplains came and baptized the Russian, Greek and Serb children there and celebrated Divine Liturgy. In 1863 the Russian navy lay anchor in San Francisco and New York and stayed an entire year touring, as support to the Union during the War Between the States. The chaplain on the battleship in New York, who the newspapers recorded as baptizing children, later came back as bishop of Alaska and the Aleutians with his cathedral in San Francisco after the Alaskan purchase. One ship passed through New Orleans, once the Union forces took it. In San Francisco, celebrating Pascha with the Russian Admiral, Kostromitinov and other local Orthodox thereafter formed an Orthodox Society in San Francisco. It included not only the remnants of Fort Ross in San Francisco, but also new arrivals-like George Fisher, a Serb who had served the Republic of Texas and had settled in San Francisco as the Consul of the Kingdom of Greece-all served by the Russian naval chaplains.
It is only then that New Orleans enters the picture. There another Greek Consul, Nicholas Benachi, had been trying to organize a parish since 1860. Word got out through the returning Russian Fleet to a Agapius Honcharenko, a hierodeacon of the Kievan Caves attached to the Russian embassy chapel in Athens, who made his way without canonical leave nor ordination to America, passing himself off as a priest. Through private and Episcopalian channels, Benachi hosted Honcharenko in New Orleans. Honcharenko, however went on to San Francisco, as Fr. Kovrigin, the resident priest in San Francisco, reported back to Bishop Paul in Sitka in 1868:
About the presbyter Agapius Honcharenko. When I arrived to S.-Francisco, Mister Consul warned me to not allow myself to receive him and not to talk to him. In the evening, ... a man of small stature with a black beard came to my apartment and ordered me to give him vestments and the antimension, and [to cease?] a campaign to establish a newspaper. As I was already warned, I told him that I could not have anything to do with him and asked him to leave me alone. He left my apartment very angrily, and then began to curse all around the city. He is a former monk and married to an Italian woman. The Slavs cannot stand him.
http://www.holy-trinity.org/history/1868/03.00.Kovrigin-Paul.html
Unlike Honcharenko, Fr. Kovrigin had an antimens and a bishop, and that bishop had been resident and serving in North America for the Russian Holy Synod for decades by then. In fact, when the Americans came to California and set up an Episcopal diocese with US annexation, they first thought of getting orders from the bishop in Sitka. With the Alaskan purchase, the Russians and Orthodox natives were, by terms of the treaty, US citizens and guaranteed ownership of the Church. Many came with the departing bishop on his way across the US to go back to Russia, not across the Pacific, as he came, but across North America and then the Atlantic, serving a Thanksgiving-in the American sense of the word-in New York before leaving. They settled in San Francisco, and within a few years the incoming bishop of Sitka followed them, settling in San Francisco in 1871. At the time there were plans to organize three episcopal sees in North America, in San Francisco, New Orleans (the Czar sending gifts to Holy Trinity in New Orleans, still treasured there, and his brother visiting) and New York.
http://orthodoxhistory.org/2009/10/30/three-bishops-for-america-in-1870/
In New York, however, the Episcopalians complained-in CA!-about having two bishops in one city, they considering themselves as the "Western Orthodox Church,' as so a chapel instead was managed there. (New York law, however, still required that any Orthodox Church that incorporated name the Russian Consul and Plenipotentiary as members of the corporation). The reports of its priest, however, show that he was interacting with the rest of the country. The bishop would be translated from San Francisco to New York in 1900, and renamed the bishop of the Aleutians and North America, there celebrating the first consecration in the New World of a bishop in 1904. At that point, if not long before, per canon 8 of the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus, claimed the whole continent (Canada recognizing his jurisdiction, as the US-Russian Alaskan Cession treaty did, on June 19, 1903).
Why should Alaska cede priority to New Orleans? After all, even if the New Orleans was all canonically in order, it would not be followed by another Greek Orthodox Church until 1898 in Chicago, and not a parish or Orthodox society of any sort until 1891.
