Metropolitan Antony (Bashir)

The archdiocese Bashir inherited in 1936 was not in good order. Antiochian Orthodoxy in North America had been split for years between rival claimants, and its parishes were immigrant congregations held together largely by their own energy. What is credited to him, in his own archdiocese's account and in the historical literature alike, is the unglamorous work of consolidation: bringing the splintered parishes into one administratively sound and financially solvent body.

The deeper change was linguistic. Bashir understood early that a church which served only in Arabic would lose the generation born in America, and he acted on it — shifting The Word into English, encouraging English in the services, and receiving and ordaining American converts at a time when several jurisdictions treated converts as an oddity. Fr Michael Gelsinger's 1938 Handbook for Orthodox Sunday Schools went out with Bashir's blessing; his Orthodox Hymns in English was published by Bashir's archdiocese the year after.

Bashir's other life was literary. Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese-American poet whose The Prophet became one of the best-selling books of the century, entrusted him with the Arabic translation of all his English works — The Madman, The Forerunner, The Prophet, Sand and Foam, Jesus the Son of Man and The Earth Gods.

It is an unusual line on a hierarch's record, and it belongs on this one, because the same faculty is at work in both halves of his life. A man who could carry Gibran's English back into Arabic without losing him was the same man who understood what it would cost the Church to stay in a language its grandchildren did not speak.

Bashir was among the hierarchs behind the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas, the first durable structure through which the jurisdictions in North America acted together rather than separately — a recurring aspiration in American Orthodox history and, in this instance, one that lasted.

In 1958 the Patriarch of Antioch, in consultation with the other autocephalous churches, authorized him to establish the Western Rite within the archdiocese: Orthodox parishes worshipping according to Western liturgical forms. It remains a debated provision, and it is recorded here as history. In 1961 he ordained a group of former members of a Western religious society who had come into the Church under it.

Metropolitan Antony Bashir's thirty years are the hinge on which Antiochian Orthodoxy in North America turns from an immigrant chaplaincy into an American church. The consolidation was administrative and dull to describe; its consequence was that there was something solid enough, by the 1980s, to receive two thousand evangelical converts at once without breaking.

The language question is where his judgment shows most clearly. Bashir moved on English early, against the instincts of many of his own people, because he could see what would happen to a church whose grandchildren could not follow its services. He is not glorified and nothing here implies veneration; what is recorded is a bishop who understood translation — of books, and of a whole church — as a work of preservation rather than of loss.