Stephen Varzaly - American Carpatho-Rusyn Diocese

American Carpatho-Rusyn Diocese

Varzaly backed the 1936 formation of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, but by 1949 left to support a newly created Carpatho-Russian People's Church under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church in North America.

In 1937, Varzaly—by then stationed for six years at St. Michael Greek Catholic Church in Rankin, Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh’s Monongahela Valley—joined three dozen other Byzantine rite priests to form a Carpatho-Rusyn diocese independent of Rome and the Latin rite bishops of the United States. The first bishop, Orestes Chornock, was elected by his fellow priests and consecrated the following year by Orthodox bishops of the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople. Varzaly served as treasurer for the new diocese. He took seriously his role as guardian of the funds contributed by the largely impoverished faithful, refusing to sign checks for expenditures he believed inappropriate. This sparked controversy and lawsuits, but Varzaly prevailed in each.

Varzaly did not believe a juridical break with Rome to be sufficient, however. On the pages of his newsletter Vistnik (“The Messenger”) and in diocesan councils he argued for the elimination of Latinizations in the liturgy and popular devotions that had become part of the Eastern Church’s practice over the course of centuries living alongside Western Catholics.

The touchstone for authentic Eastern practice was held to be that of the Russian Orthodox Church. Varzaly and others argued that the preservation of Eastern tradition demanded an end to devotions of western origin such as the Stations of the Cross and the rosary.

Gradually, devotions of western origin disappeared from Orthodox practice; their standing remains the subject of debate among Byzantine Catholics to this day. Changes to Divine Liturgy, although less dramatic than those made at roughly the same time by Orthodox Ukrainians, moved Carpatho-Rusyn practice closer to that of the Russian Orthodox Church. In contrast to the earlier split led by Father Alexis Toth—who led his flock into the Russian Church in both juridisdiction and practice—distinctive Rusyn elements remained in the liturgy.

This search for a liturgical and devotional life shorn of Western accretions led Rev. Varzaly to re-examine his earlier positions about the proper standing of the new Carpatho-Rusyn diocese within worldwide Orthodoxy. Once an advocate of submission “neither to Rome nor Moscow,” by 1950 he was making the case that since it was to the Patriarchate of Moscow to which the people turned for the pure form of the Eastern liturgy, the independent Carpatho-Rusyn church ought to look to Moscow, the “Third Rome” rather than to the remnant of ethnic Greeks representing the ancient patriarchates of Constantinople and Antioch in a modern Turkey that seemed no longer remotely hospitable to Christians.

This was a controversial position among the Carpatho-Rusyns. While none disputed that their people were Slavs, the Carpatho-Rus had been largely untouched by the pan-Slav movement of the previous century. Constantinople, moreover, was the Mother Church of the East, an imperial city when Moscow was a collection of mud huts on the banks of the Moskva River. By turning to the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, moreover, they could legitimize their position as an Orthodox church with little chance that they would be prevented from running their own affairs.

1950 was not the most auspicious time for a naturalized American to be arguing in favor of submission to guidance, much less instruction, from Moscow. Rev. Varzaly’s rivals in the church were not slow to capitalize on that and in short order, the FBI surveilled him as a pro-Russian and pro-Communist sympathizer during the Red Scare of the 1950s and he ultimately testified before Congress about his activities. Nothing came of the charges. A review of two years' of his writings not only found nothing “subversive”, even by the somewhat hysterical standards of the day, but prompted a letter of apology from the federal government for its being drawn into an internal and essentially religious dispute.

Varzaly died June 3, 1957 in Pittsburgh's Montifiore Hospital. He is interred in Homewood Cemetery, a nonsectarian burial ground in Pittsburgh.