The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese (GOARCH)

Greek immigrants arriving in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries founded parishes wherever they settled, often before any bishop was there to guide them. The scattered communities were drawn together into a single Archdiocese, incorporated in 1921, and in 1922 the Ecumenical Patriarch Meletios IV placed the Archdiocese firmly under the care of Constantinople, where it has remained. From those beginnings it grew into the largest single Orthodox jurisdiction in the country.

Its headquarters are in New York City, and its life has always been bound up with the Greek-American community — its parishes, day schools, and well-known festivals have been centers of both faith and heritage. Over the generations, as American-born faithful succeeded the immigrants, worship in the Archdiocese has increasingly moved from Greek into English, though the older tongue is far from gone.

GOARCH is organized as an Archdiocesan District centered on New York together with eight metropolises across the country — New Jersey, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Denver. By its own reckoning it numbers on the order of five hundred parishes and around a million and a half faithful, served by hundreds of clergy. Its clergy are trained chiefly at Hellenic College and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology near Boston. Beyond the parishes the Archdiocese sustains a wide common life — youth movements and summer camps, participation in the international relief work of Orthodox charities, campus ministry, and the St. Photios National Shrine in Florida, which commemorates the earliest Greek settlers in America.

What most distinguishes GOARCH structurally is its direct tie to the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The Archbishop of America is elected and appointed through Constantinople rather than by a local synod alone, so the Greek Archdiocese is, in a real sense, the Ecumenical Patriarchate's presence in America. That connection carries both prestige and the responsibilities — and the controversies — of the first see.

Large as it is, the Greek Archdiocese is one jurisdiction among many in the American Orthodox landscape — the same overlapping arrangement described in the overview of American Orthodoxy, in which it stands beside the Antiochian, OCA, Serbian, Romanian, and other jurisdictions. Because Constantinople holds first place among the churches, the Greek Archbishop of America has customarily chaired the Assembly of Bishops, the body through which all the American jurisdictions coordinate.

Its position under Constantinople means GOARCH shares the Ecumenical Patriarchate's side of certain inter-Orthodox questions, such as the disputes with Moscow over Ukraine and primacy. Within America, however, it works and worships in full communion with every canonical Orthodox jurisdiction, and a visitor to a Greek parish is entering the same one Church he would find under any other Orthodox name (on the jurisdictional question).