Varzaly
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Very Rt. Rev. Stephen Varzaly was a Carpatho-Rusyn-born Orthodox priest whose career, spent largely in America, both paralleled and shaped the religious and cultural history of the Carpatho-Rusyn people in the United States.
Rev. Varzaly was born October 6, 1890 in the village of Fulianka, then part of the vast expanse of central Europe ruled from Budapest within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like much of the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland, national boundaries would sweep over this territory again and again in the twentieth century but it is now part of Presov province of the Republic of Slovakia.
Although nationalism had been the driving force in European politics, since 1848, the Carpatho-Rusyn world into which Rev. Varzaly was born was only then developing a sense of national identity distinct from their religious one. The Carpatho-Rusyns were Byzantine-rite Catholics living in and on lands largely controlled by Latin-rite Poles and Hungarians.
The history of the union between Eastern- and Western-rite Catholics is outside the scope of this article save to note that the Carpatho-Rusyn church in the last decades of the Dual Monarchy probably enjoyed as secure a position as any of the Uniate churches in the world at that time. While its flock was largely made up of peasants, it enjoyed an official sanction from the Hapsburgs not enjoyed by the then far greater numbers of Eastern-rite Catholics in Rumania and then Russian-ruled Ukraine.
That relative religious security enjoyed by the Carpatho-Rusyns may well have contributed to the wrenching effect of the move to a very different situation in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century.
Leaving behind his native village of a few hundred souls, Rev. Varzaly was educated in the city of Presov, Czechoslovakia, then as now the home to a Byzantine rite Catholic cathedral and seminary. He was ordained there on November 7, 1915.
Just a few years later, Rev. Varzaly was offered his choice of assignment to the cathedral in Budapest or of a church in New Castle, Pennsylvania. The “Great War” had by then swept over Europe, and his wife strongly argued in favor of the move to America rather than dubious prospect of raising a family in its uncertain aftermath. Rev. Varzaly came to America in 1920, and his wife and three children followed in 1921.
The aftermath of World War I had done little bring calm to the land they left behind. By the time Rev. Varzaly’s family arrived at his first parish in New Castle, Pennsylvania, the towns and villages of the Carpathian mountains were in the first, uncertain steps of nation-building after the Paris peace conference created a new nation, Czechoslovakia, that included a majority of the Carpatho-Rusyns but left a sizable minority in a newly independent Poland regarded them with no great fondness. The waves of emigration from the Carpatho-Rusyn lands had created a flock without shepherds, concentrated in the mining and steel-making regions of Pennsylvania.
In the United States, Rev. Varzaly found an ecclesiastical situation far less tranquil than the one he had left behind. An ongoing crisis had been parked three decades earlier, when a Carpatho-Rusyn widower priest, Father Alexis Toth, had presented himself to Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul.
A less happy circumstance could hardly have been imagined. Although Irish-born and French-educated, Ireland was a ferocious advocate of a process of “Americanization” for Catholics in the United States. He had called for the abolition of the Catholic school system as an impediment to assimilation, discouraged priests from preaching to their congregations in their native languages even though many spoke of those in the pews spoke nothing but German, and sedulously avoided any confrontation with the often aggressively anti-Catholic civil authorities.
Confronted with a bearded, widowed priest of another liturgical tradition altogether bent on ministering to recent immigrants of wholly unfamiliar language and customs, Ireland did what came naturally: forbade Toth to work in his territory and attempted to prohibit the immigration of Eastern-rite Catholic clergy.
In doing so, Ireland earned himself the bitter title of “Father of the Orthodox Church in America.” Toth led thousands of Eastern-rite Catholics into the Orthodox Church despite the near-total lack of an Orthodox hierarchy in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century; he is today revered as “St. Alexis of Wilkes-Barre” by the Orthodox.
That controversy still roiled the Carpatho-Rusyn church when Rev. Varzaly arrived, with his wife and children soon to follow despite an ineffectively policed document from the Vatican forbidding married Eastern-rite priests from coming to the United States. This measure, granted as a concession to Ireland in 1890, was given teeth in 1929 and became a flashpoint in later controversies.
By the twenties, discontent among the Ruthenian clergy working in the United States was palpable; clerical celibacy—essentially unknown among the parish clergy of the Christian East—became a focal point for two reasons. On practical grounds, it reduced nearly to zero the number of priests who could come to the United States to serve; on symbolic grounds, it was one more unfamiliar element introduced lives already disrupted by the trip to a new country and the substitution of the coal mines or factory floor for the pastoral rhythms of village life.
Many Carpatho-Rusyns, including Rev. Varzaly, believed clerical celibacy to be so inherently unnatural as to lead inevitably to promiscuity and sexual abuse.
The first bishop for the Carpatho-Rus was sent by Rome in 1922, but the seeds of disunion had already been sown. While those in authority in Rome may have seen Eastern Catholics as vital in a global struggle against materialism and Bolshevism, neither the secular nor the religious culture of the United States warmed notably toward these displaced central Europeans in the decade that followed.
Individual priests and congregations drifted from Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy in those decades, and occasionally vice versa, but through the Depression years, the Byzantine clergy was preoccupied with their near-destitute congregations, a circumstance that almost certainly delayed a definitive break. Despite the increasingly uneasy situation, Rev. Varzaly edited the newsletter of the Byzantine Catholic diocese throughout this time.
In 1937, Rev. Varzaly—by then stationed for five years at St. Michael's 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 resident in New York.
Rev. 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 Rev. Varzaly prevailed in each.
Rev. 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. Rev. 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 Ukranians, 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, to Moscow. Rev. Varzaly’s rivals in the church were not slow to capitalize on that, and in short order Rev. Varzaly, by then hardly a stranger to controversy, found himself the subject of an FBI investigation and ultimately testified before Congress about his activities.
Nothing came of the charges; Rev. Varzaly was no adherent of the “throne and altar” conservatism of nineteenth-century Europe but no one who tended a flock of European refugees could long entertain doubts about the nature of totalitarianism. A review of two years worth 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 having allowed themselves to be drawn into an internal and essentially religious dispute.
Rev. Varzaly returned to his pastoral work and his writing, which continued until his death on June 3, 1957.
