The American Orthodox Catholic Church: A History That Did Not End in 1933 (Recovering the AOCC’s Place in American Orthodoxy and Its Continuity Through the Noli–Contegeorge Succession)
By: Bishop Stephen Introduction: The Problem with the Word “Defunct” The history of the American Orthodox Catholic Church is usually told in a few compressed sentences. Archbishop Aftimios Ofiesh established an autonomous American Orthodox jurisdiction in 1927. He married in 1933. The Church collapsed. Whatever appeared afterward belonged to the shadowy world of independent bishops and possessed no meaningful continuity with the original body. This account contains elements of truth, but it is not the whole truth. The original American Orthodox Catholic Church unquestionably suffered a catastrophic institutional crisis during the early 1930s. Archbishop Aftimios’s marriage, the loss of Russian ecclesiastical support, the departure of clergy and parishes, and the deaths of several bishops prevented the jurisdiction from developing into the stable, universally recognized local Church its founders envisioned. No responsible historian should deny this disruption. Yet disruption is no...