Orthodox Churches in Connecticut

Orthodox parishes in Connecticut grew out of industrial-era immigration. Holy Ghost Orthodox Church in Bridgeport began in 1894, when Greek Catholic immigrants unwilling to remain under Rome met Fr. Alexis Toth, later canonized as St. Alexis of Wilkes-Barre, and joined the Russian Orthodox Church. Its parish history calls it the mother church of Orthodoxy in New England, and early Greek, Serbian, Romanian and Albanian immigrants worshiped there until they organized their own parishes. In 1896 Tsar Nicholas II donated six bells cast for his coronation, and a special act of Congress admitted them duty free.

Similar divisions shaped other parishes. Orestes Chornock, pastor of St. John the Baptist Church in Bridgeport, was consecrated a bishop at Constantinople in 1938 after Greek Catholic churches broke with Rome. In New Britain, a manufacturing city, disagreements within a Byzantine Catholic parish led western Ukrainian immigrants to form their own parish by 1910; it became St. Mary's Ukrainian Orthodox Church. After 1991 it received a fourth wave of Ukrainian immigration and became a commuter parish as suburbs grew.

Greek immigrants reached Hartford in 1898 and the textile city of Norwich in the 1890s. St. George Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Hartford, formed in 1931 from separate Greek communities, consecrated its Fairfield Avenue church in 1968. St. Dimitrie Romanian Orthodox Church, founded by Macedo-Romanian immigrants in 1924, moved from Bridgeport to Easton in 2009. Greek, Russian, Carpatho-Russian, Ukrainian and Romanian parishes, among others, cluster in Fairfield County, the Hartford area, New Haven and Norwich.