The beginnings...

In the early 1960s a group of friends and acquaintances in the Rochester area had come to feel more and more the need for an Orthodox church at which they could worship. There were several Orthodox churches in Rochester then, an Albanian, Greek, Russian and Ukrainian, all strongly ethnic in culture and language. This group of friends did not fit neatly into any of those three groups, since the friends were many of them Carpatho-Russian, some Macedonian, and a few of other backgrounds.

So in early 1964 at the urging of John Wargo, one of the older members of the group, they began to look into starting a new church, that would be in English and accessible to all. They worked with Father Warnecke of Sts. Peter and Paul church in Syracuse, a parish of what was then known by the rather confusing name of the "Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic" church, the forerunner of today's Orthodox Church of America. Father Warnecke advised the group on how to proceed and they submitted a formal application to Metropolitan Leonty in Februrary 1964. Their proposal was welcomed and the new parish of St. John the Baptist in Rochester was formally established. (Metropolitan Leonty is shown here. He was a visionary leader and a keen proponent of establishing English language parishes that would open the treasures of Orthodoxy to all in this country.)

Oh, the "Carpatho-Russians?" They are not a well known group to many, but they are, or were, a distinct ethnic group. They were a Slavic people from central and eastern Europe, with their own culture, speaking their own Slavic dialect, as well as Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian or other languages, depending on what empire or nation they happened to be under. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries many emigrated to the mining and steel mill centers of the Pennsylvania and New York border region, and some of the industrial cities of  the Mohawk Valley, out in Ohio and so on. Most of our founders were Carpatho-Russians who had come to Rochester to work from places like Mayfield PA and Elmira NY.