St. Raphael of Brooklyn

Raphael Hawaweeny, born in Beirut to a Damascene family, educated at Halki and the Kiev Academy, who came to New York in 1895 at the request of the Syrian Orthodox immigrants there, who had no priest who spoke their language. He built St Nicholas Cathedral in Brooklyn, travelled the continent on foot and by rail looking for scattered Orthodox families, founded some thirty parishes and an Arabic journal, and in 1904 became the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in North America, at the hands of St Tikhon. He died in 1915. Glorified by the Orthodox Church in America and the Antiochian Archdiocese in 2000. Feast: February 27.