Fr. Thomas Hopko of St Vladimir's

Thomas John Hopko was born in 1939 in Endicott, New York, to John and Anna (Zapotocky) Hopko, and was baptized and raised in St Mary's Carpatho-Russian Orthodox church — the world of the Rusyn and Slavic immigrants who had brought their faith to the mill and factory towns of the American Northeast. His was a thoroughly American Orthodoxy, formed not in the old country but in the parishes of a new one, and this rootedness in ordinary parish life would mark his whole ministry.

After graduating from Union-Endicott High School in 1956, he went on to Fordham University, completing a bachelor's degree in Russian studies in 1960. He then entered St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, taking his theological degree in 1963, and later earned a master's degree in philosophy from Duquesne University and, in 1982, a doctorate in theology from Fordham.

At St Vladimir's, Hopko came under the formation of the great figures of the Russian theological emigration — above all Fr Alexander Schmemann and Fr John Meyendorff. In June 1963 he married Anne Schmemann, Fr Alexander's daughter, joining teacher and student in one family; the couple would have five children. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1963.

The link was more than personal. Hopko inherited and made his own Schmemann's conviction that theology is not an academic specialty but the Church's living confession, and that its treasures belong to every believer. Where his father-in-law wrote for a wide readership in a luminous, essayistic key, Hopko translated the same vision into plain speech — the patient, unhurried catechesis of a parish priest who assumed nothing and explained everything.

Before and during his seminary career Hopko served as a parish priest — at churches in Warren, Ohio (1963–1968), Wappingers Falls, New York (1968–1978), and Jamaica Estates, New York (1978–1983). He never regarded the pulpit and the lectern as separate callings, and colleagues remembered that he taught the priesthood “by doing, by being.”

He joined the St Vladimir's faculty in 1968 and taught there until 2002, rising from lecturer to Professor of Dogmatic Theology and forming a generation of clergy and teachers. He was elevated to archpriest in 1970 and raised to the dignity of protopresbyter, the highest honor for a married priest, in 1995.

In September 1992 Hopko was appointed dean of St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, succeeding Fr John Meyendorff and standing in a line of deanship that ran back through Meyendorff to his own father-in-law, Alexander Schmemann. He served until his retirement from the office on July 1, 2002, also acting as rector of the seminary's Three Hierarchs Chapel.

As dean he consolidated St Vladimir's role as a leading center of English-language Orthodox theological education in North America, while continuing to teach the dogmatics courses for which he was best known. Successors recalled his outsized influence on their own thought and teaching — a formation that was as much about the manner of a Christian priest as about the content of the syllabus.

Hopko's most enduring written work is The Orthodox Faith: An Elementary Handbook on the Orthodox Church, a four-volume catechetical series — on Doctrine, Worship, Bible and Church History, and Spirituality — first issued in colorful covers that earned it the affectionate name of the “rainbow series.” Translated into numerous languages, it became a standard introduction for inquirers, converts, and catechism classes across the English-speaking Orthodox world.

Around it he built a long shelf of accessible books, most from St Vladimir's Seminary Press: seasonal companions such as The Lenten Spring and The Winter Pascha, the essay collection All the Fullness of God, and pastoral treatments of contemporary questions. His gift was to make the fullness of Orthodox teaching plain without diluting it — theology delivered in the register of a homily.

In his retirement years Hopko reached his widest audience of all. Beginning in 2008 he recorded well over 400 podcasts for Ancient Faith Radio, most within his signature series “Speaking the Truth in Love,” in which he answered listeners' questions on faith, prayer, marriage, suffering, and the Christian life in the same warm, direct voice his students had known.

It was for these listeners that he first recorded his “55 Maxims” — a short list of practical counsels for everyday life in Christ, composed when someone asked him to sum up the Christian life “in the shortest form.” Beginning “Be always with Christ and trust God in everything” and ending “Get help when you need it, without fear or shame,” the maxims have been copied, printed, and shared by Orthodox Christians around the world, and remain among the most widely circulated words associated with his name.

Father Thomas Hopko was perhaps the most accessible Orthodox catechist of his generation in the English-speaking world. Standing in the line of St Vladimir's deans that ran from his father-in-law Alexander Schmemann through John Meyendorff, he took the theology of the Russian emigration and rendered it in plain American speech — clear, warm, and economical — so that clergy, converts, and lifelong faithful alike could receive it. His four-volume The Orthodox Faith and his hundreds of recorded talks became, for countless people, the doorway into Orthodox Christianity.

His influence widened rather than narrowed after his retirement: through Ancient Faith Radio and the ever-circulating “55 Maxims,” his voice reached far beyond the seminary classroom into ordinary homes and daily prayer. He engaged difficult contemporary questions directly and pastorally, and while assessments of particular positions vary, his stature as a teacher who made the fullness of the faith intelligible to modern believers is widely acknowledged.