Orthodox Churches in Minnesota

St. Mary’s Orthodox Cathedral in Minneapolis, the mother church of Eastern Orthodoxy in the Twin Cities region, began as a Greek Catholic church opened in 1888 by Rusyn immigrants, who had been settling in Northeast Minneapolis since 1877. After Archbishop John Ireland rejected the credentials of its widowed pastor, Alexis Toth, the parish was received into the Russian Orthodox Diocese of the Aleutians and North America, informally in 1891 and formally in 1892, an event that figured in the return of Eastern Rite Catholics to Orthodoxy. The present cathedral opened in 1906.

Serbs emigrated to Minnesota around 1900 and settled in industrial areas of the Iron Range, Duluth and the Twin Cities. A National Register nomination calls the Serbian congregation founded in Chisholm the state’s first. Serbian, Russian and Romanian priests and missionaries from Chisholm initially served Duluth’s Serbs, and in 1923 Father Vladimir Porobich assembled the nucleus of the St. George congregation in Duluth’s Gary district. In South St. Paul, Serbs first worshiped in a combined Serbian-Russian church before St. Sava was organized in 1950 and its church dedicated in 1953.

St. Mary’s Greek Orthodox Church in Minneapolis dates its founding to 1900, and Ukrainians in Northeast Minneapolis, the center of the Twin Cities’ Ukrainian community since the late nineteenth century, formed St. Michael’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 1925. In Fridley, the Russian Orthodox Church and Skete of the Resurrection of Christ, a church and monastery of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, holds services in Church Slavonic and English.