NYC Scene: Cross and Crescent

The cross on St. Mary's Church
2nd Ave & 15 Street, New York
Photo: LB

Three-bar cross without a dome,

Eastern church aligned with Rome -

In this strange East Village scene

Story arc is byzantine.

A couple of weeks ago, walking up Second Avenue I noticed an eight-pointed cross projected against the evening sky. An Orthodox church, I thought, – not an unusual sight in East Village. The sign in front of the church, however, announced that it was St. Mary’s Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite. This sounded like an oxymoron: how can something be Catholic and Byzantine at once? A page of dense text on St. Mary’s website explains that this church has been brought to the US by Carpatho-Ruthenians, or Rusyns; it follows the Eastern (Byzantine) ritual, yet bears allegiance to Rome and is therefore Catholic.

Sign in front of St. Mary's

Perhaps embarrassingly, I first learned about Rusyns from the movie The Deer Hunter, which, despite stellar cast, was so incoherent and made my BS-o-meter go out of scale so often that I dismissed it as a source of information altogether. The characters in this movie were said to be Russians, but were certainly not behaving like Russians: they were neat and cheerful, had strong work ethic and lived in a tight-knit community. At first I chalked it up to this film's high level of background nonsense, in the same category as the Cascades playing the role of the Appalachians, but later I found out that these people were in fact Rusyns, or Carpatho-Ruthenians, a Central European Slavic ethnicity. After running into St. Mary’s, I thought it was time to find out more about them.

This website, everyculture.com, provides a summary on Rusyns and their history in the US. Rusyns originate from an area of the Carpathian Mountains where the borders of Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland meet. In the past millennium, the state borders in that region changed almost as often as the weather in the mountains, so counting Rusyns, who are scattered over half a dozen Central European states, is not a trivial task. Currently the majority of Rusyns live in Ukraine and smaller populations can be found in Slovakia and Poland and several other neighboring countries, with a total number around one million people.

Rusyns started immigrating to the US in 1870s and by WWI about 225 thousand of them came to this country; another 20 thousand came during the time between the wars, and finally 10 thousand arrived in the years after WWII and then their influx ceased. Early Rusyn immigrants settled in areas where jobs in coal mining and steel industry could be found, mainly in Pennsylvania and Ohio. For example, the Rusyns shown in The Deer Hunter worked at a steel mill in Cleveland, OH. Undoubtedly the most famous among Rusyns in the US is Andy Warhol, born Andrej Varhola in Pittsburgh, PA, where his father worked in a coal mine. Warhol's parents were Lemko, a sub-group of Rusyns, who came to this country from Slovakia. The Varhola family worshiped at St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church, a church of traditional Catholic design with two towers above the entrance, but each crowned with an Eastern onion dome and an eight-pointed cross. Warhol is buried next to his parents at St. John the Baptist Cemetery near St. John's Byzantine Catholic Church.

First-generation Rusyn immigrants were active in their communities and organized schools and clubs, created mutual-benefit organizations to help each other weather the hard times, and published newspapers in their native language. The next generation wanted to blend in with the surrounding blandness, but the subsequent generations embraced their roots more readily, and the Rusyn culture is now being revived. Following the demise of the American steel and coal-mining industries, many Rusyn communities disintegrated and their members were scattered all over the country. I never appreciated the scale of the demographic and cultural shifts caused, for example, by the closing of the steel mills until a recent conversation with a member of the Gore Mountain dreaming circle, who grew up in Pittsburgh in a big family of a steel worker and briefly worked at the mill after high school. All of his siblings received college education - a tough financial act to follow for a blue-collar family these days. 

St. Mary Byzantine Catholic Church

Church has always been central to the Rusyn communities, and this is where things become complicated. Rusyns received Christianity in the ninth century from the Greek monks Cyrill and Methodius, the creators of the Cyrillic alphabet, and followed the Eastern Orthodox tradition after the East-West Schism of 1054. This meant that Rusyn priests could marry and the service was conducted in Church Slavonic language. However, in mid-17 century, some Rusyn bishops and priests decided to align themselves with Rome, while others remained Eastern Orthodox and loyal to the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople. Those who accepted the rule of Rome were allowed to keep their old rituals (and married priests!), and were thus called “Greek Catholics” or “Byzantine Rite Catholics”. (In this country, the latter name was adopted to emphasize that this church had nothing to do with the Greeks as a nationality).

Upon arrival to the US, Rusyns sought to re-establish their church, but were not welcomed by the American Catholics, who were staunchly opposed to the contamination of the proper Roman tradition. This less than hospitable reception resulted in the first exodus of Rusyns from the Catholic rite back to the Eastern Orthodox tradition in 1892, which was led by a Minneapolis-based priest Father Alexis Toth, who was made a saint of the Orthodox Church in America in 1994. But the troubles for the Rusyn church were not over yet. In 1929, Rome ordered Rusyns to accept celibacy of the priests. This issue proved to be so contentious that it caused a second secession, which resulted in creation of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox church.

In the same neighborhood as the Rome-governed St. Mary’s Byzantine Church, two churches belonging to the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, aligned with the Constantinople Patriarch, can also be found: St. Nicholas of Myra Orthodox Church on East 10 Street and St. Mary Orthodox Church on East 7 Street. This is how they describe themselves:

What is the Orthodox Church? 

The Orthodox Church is:
Evangelical but not Protestant;
It is Orthodox but not Jewish,
It is Catholic but not Roman,
It is not denominational…
It is pre-denominational.
It has believed, taught, preserved, defended
And died for the Faith of the Apostles
Since the Day of Pentecost.

Until they make it easy for me, I am giving up on their convoluted taxonomy, especially considering that churches of quite a few other flavors of Orthodoxy are located nearby.