February 16th
Robert Josias Morgan Father Raphael born c1870 died date unknown
aka
click on image for larger view.
Robert Josias Morgan was born in Chapelton, Clarendon, around 1870, but little has so far come to light about his family or background. It was said that he grew up in the Church of England, and that after his father died when he was less than a year old, his mother had to see to his up-bringing.
It has not been possible so far to sort out his movements from the mid-1880s to mid-1890s. According to one newspaper report it seems that he went to Sierra Leone in the mid-1880s and attended first the Church of England Grammar School and then Fourah Bay College. It was possibly after this that he spent some years doing missionary work in Liberia. After this he went to the USA, and then to England, seeking further training, at St Aiden's Theological College, Birkenhead, and King's College, London; St Aiden's has no record of him, nor apparently does King's College. In 1895 he arrived in New York from the UK, already described as a 'Minister'.
The first record of his connection with the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA comes with his ordination as deacon by Bishop Coleman in the Diocese of Delaware in 1895. He continued to appear in PECUSA records until 1905, but he was not ordained to the Episcopalian priesthood it seems. By this time he was in the Philadelphia area, and was apparently rethinking his commitment to the Episcopalian Church which he had belonged to since childhood.
There is some indication that Morgan moved to the Methodist Church before finally committing himself to the Greek Orthodox Church in 1907. It is this final decision that is so remarkable, apparently making him the first man of African ancestry in the Americas to be ordained into an Eastern Orthodox Church. With the support of the Rev Demetrios Petrides of Philadelphia, Robert Morgan went to Constantinople/Istanbul in 1907. There, between August 2 and August 15, he was baptised 'Raphael' and was ordained, first deacon, and then priest. He was given vestments, liturgical books, a cross and £20 for his travelling expenses. Ellis Island records indicate the arrival in New York from Naples, Italy, of the priest, Raffaele Morgan, in December 1907.
View of Constantinople in 1910
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Not much is known of Father Raphael's career in the Church after this. It certainly appears that he continued within the Orthodox Church in Philadelphia but after 1916 there is no information on his further activities; one suggestion is that he left the USA and went to live in Palestine.
However in 1913-4 he had paid a visit to the land of his birth, and toured the island, lecturing and taking part in services. He gave vivid accounts of his travels in the Holy Land and the Middle East, though it is not clear when those travels had taken place. When he left from Port Antonio to return to Philadelphia he was promising to return to Jamaica to establish a mission of the Greek Orthodox Church. However, at the moment, the only other reference to him after that was in a letter to Jamaican newspapers in 1916 highly critical of the lectures being given in the USA by Marcus Garvey. One other link with Garvey is a possible contact, at some point, between Morgan and G A McGuire, who instituted the African Orthodox Church which was associated with Garvey's UNIA.
Two scholars in the USA, involved in research of the Greek Orthodox Church, have done and are continuing research into Father Raphael's career, and I hope that sometime in the future the gaps in his story will be filled in.
more on Father Raphael
the worthy frog
Joy Lumsden 2007
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