Archbishop Job (Osacky)
1946 – 2009
Archbishop of Chicago and the Midwest, remembered above all for asking aloud, in a room of bishops who would not, whether the allegations of financial misconduct in his Church's central administration were true.
Archbishop Job (1946–2009), born Richard John Osacky, was Archbishop of Chicago and the Midwest in the Orthodox Church in America. He studied at Northern Illinois University and graduated from St Tikhon's Seminary in 1970, serving first as a cantor and youth director in Pennsylvania.
He is remembered for one thing above the rest. When allegations surfaced that money given to the Church had been misappropriated within its central administration, Job was the bishop who asked publicly and in the Synod whether they were true — a question his brother bishops were, by the accounts of the period, unwilling to put. He then extended the protection of his diocese to the layman whose reporting was keeping the matter in the open.
He reposed suddenly on 18 December 2009, at sixty-three, before the process he had forced was finished.
The questionReadHide
The crisis that broke in the Orthodox Church in America in the middle 2000s concerned the misappropriation of funds — including money given for missions and for charity — within the central administration in Syosset. What made it a crisis rather than a scandal was the response: for a long period the allegations were not investigated, and those raising them were treated as the problem.
Job's contribution was not investigative. It was that he asked, on the record and in the Synod, whether the allegations were true or false, and would not be moved off the question. In a hierarchical Church, a bishop willing to say aloud what others will not is worth more than a dossier; the accounting that followed, and the eventual independent investigation, are traceable to the point at which the question could no longer be avoided.
He also gave Mark Stokoe, the layman whose site was reporting the matter continuously, the standing of a diocesan officer within the Diocese of the Midwest. Without that protection the reporting would very likely have been shut down.
His own admissionReadHide
The detail that gives the rest its weight is that Job did not claim to have been right from the beginning. He admitted afterwards, penitentially, that when the situation was first put to him around 1999 and 2000 his own reaction had been that it was the central administration's problem and no business of his diocese.
That admission is why this page can be written without embarrassment. A man who says he was slow, and then acts, is a more usable example than one who is described as having always seen clearly. It is also a plain instance of the thing the Church actually asks of people, which is repentance rather than a clean record.
Historical SignificanceReadHide
Archbishop Job is in this section for an unglamorous reason: institutions do not correct themselves, and somebody with standing has to be willing to be difficult. In the Orthodox Church in America's financial crisis he was that person, at a cost to his relations with his brother bishops that those who knew him did not think was small.
He is not glorified, and this page implies no veneration. It records a bishop who was slow, said so, and then did the thing anyway — and who died before he could see it finished.
Timeline5 momentsReadHide
- 1946BornRichard John Osacky is born on 18 March 1946. source ↗
- 1970St Tikhon's SeminaryHe graduates from St Tikhon's Seminary in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, and serves as cantor and youth director at St John the Baptist, Black Lick. source ↗
- 1999–2000First toldThe financial situation in the central administration is put to him; by his own later admission he treats it as the administration's problem rather than his own. source ↗
- 2005–08The accountingHe asks in the Synod whether the allegations are true, and gives episcopal protection to the reporting that keeps the matter in the open until an investigation follows. source ↗
- 2009ReposeHe reposes suddenly on 18 December 2009, aged sixty-three. source ↗
Related2ShowHide
This profile is a historical account compiled from the sources listed and remains subject to clergy and source review.