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Book Review: Apostle to the Plains
Apostle to the Plains is the story of the first Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christian priest to be ordained in the United States: Father Nicola Yanney. This is remarkable in itself, but Father Nicola would, in this role, serve as the sole parish priest for almost the entirety of the Great Plains for over a decade, riding a circuit that would take him regularly from Kanas to Michigan, from Michigan to North Dakota, and from North Dakota back to his home in Nebraska. Along this way, he would perform over one thousand baptisms, numerous weddings, and a number of funerals, including for close relatives, and even his own daughter. His is a very American tale, sharing as it does the travails of millions of other immigrants, but his is also very much a family tale, and a tale of great personal sacrifice.
Of the many tumults of the 19th century, one that is less well remembered today is the Arab diaspora. Millions of Arabs, many of them Christians, facing poverty and Ottoman oppression left their homes in what is today Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, for the better opportunities available in the New World. There are many common themes one finds in the history of immigration to the United States, and the necessary exile from one’s homeland. Some of these stories, especially in their broad ethnic arcs, are well known to us today – the Catholic Irish, Italians, and Polish, the Jewish diaspora from all over Europe – and they share much in common with the Arab-immigrant experience. In this, Father Nicola’s early story will feel familiar. In the late 19th century, Nicola and his newlywed bride Martha followed the example of many of his countrymen in leaving behind poverty and Turkish pogroms, with help from loans from others who have already made the journey and established themselves, and found themselves in central Nebraska.
Their story upon arrival is likewise familiar in its contours: Nicola worked hard in a job that also helped him learn English, he and Martha started a family, and when they could afford to do so they became farmers and moved to a sod house out on the prairie, nearer a much smaller town. There was another, sadder, familiarity – Martha died in childbirth with their fifth child, and the little girl, premature, died herself days later. During all this time, the Orthodox communities on the Great Plains had no priests or clergy or churches of their own, and had to rely on the one circuit-riding priest of the time, Father Raphael Hawaweeny. When Father Raphael was consecrated as a bishop in 1904 (the first Orthodox bishop to be consecrated in North America), he gained the authority to ordain others as priests, and Nicola Yanney was nominated by his community to be theirs. Given the scarcity of communities large enough to support priests and churches, Father Nicola would serve not only his home community in Carney, Nebraska, but most of the rest of the Great Plains for over a decade.
The American heartland is vast. We forget this today with our extensive road system, ubiquitous automobiles, and sprawling suburbs and metropolitan regions, but you can still attain something of a feel for the wide-open spaces if you should ever drive across the Great Plains, as they stretch from northern Texas in the south, to Minnesota and North Dakota, and on into Canada, and from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River, and arguably even across Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. If you have ever driven, hour after hour, across Nebraska or Kansas, you begin to grasp the true scale. Imagine crossing it on foot, or by horse-cart, or even by a 19th-century steam train, where the hours turn into days, or the days into weeks. This was Father Nicola Yanney’s territory as a circuit-riding priest.
Father Nicola would eventually perform over a thousand baptisms, numerous weddings, and a great number of funerals, including his own daughter’s, when she was 12. He faced a perpetual struggle to balance the needs of his own local parish with the needs of scattered Orthodox communities in his vast territory, and the book often recounts him arriving home, only to be required to travel again within days due to some emergency or other. He often had to play peacemaker too, either within the Orthodox communities, or between them and others. He even served as an Orthodox priest at the replica of the Holy Sepulcher church built at the St. Louis World’s Fair.
Even by today’s standards of travel, Father Nicola’s schedule was punishing, and the distances enormous. But from this schedule, and surviving records, correspondence, and family recollections, Fr. Nicola’s devotion is readily apparent. He served even when financial support was lacking, acquiring significant debt to keep his three remaining children housed, fed, and in school while serving far afield. This is in marked contrast to other priests ordained after him, who sometimes would leave their assigned parishes for wealthier locales, forcing Nicola to keep up a longer travel schedule than he should have. It was his great piety that led his home community to nominate him to the priesthood, and that piety remained undiminished throughout his career.
In this time of the COVID pandemic, it is especially fitting to remember Father Nicola, for it was in the Spanish Flu pandemic that he lost his life, visiting with the sick and the dying in his own home town. Just as we are sometimes unaware of the size of our nation, we are often forgetful of how much our ancestors had to struggle, and how recently they lived with dangers that today we consider long forgotten. Apostle to the Plains is a worthy look at what service and devotion meant a century ago on the Plains, through the eyes of an itinerant immigrant priest.
Apostle to the Plains was written by the Saint Raphael Clergy Brotherhood, and was based on information provided by Father Nicola’s descendants, his surviving correspondence elsewhere, as well as Fr. Nicola’s own surviving pastoral records. The book was released last year in paperback through Ancient Faith, and just recently as an audiobook on Audible. The listening time is not long, at around eight hours, and it is engaging and clear.
Nota Bene: Ancient Faith provided me with a copy of the audiobook for review.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Additional information on Father Nicola can be found here: https://www.ancientfaith.com/specials/the_equal_of_martyrdom_fr_nicola_yanney_holy_man_of_nebraska
He sounds like he was a remarkable and dedicated man, Skip. Thanks for telling us about him.
A great story, SkipSul.
In one of Mark Twain’s travel books, as he is taking a train to San Francisco, he reflects that he is travelling over the same terrain he once crossed, covering in an hour twice the distance he could have the first time in a day, and doing it while smoking a cigar and drinking champagne.
Kearney, maybe?
Sometimes the most obvious thing in the world isn’t obvious enough. Since I was a child I’ve heard about the plight of Middle Eastern Christians, broadly including Turks and Persians, without focusing on sectarian differences. In truth, we would have dutifully ponied up anyway on a couple of Sundays a year, although–here’s the “Duh, I haven’t focused on that” moment–it didn’t fully occur to me that not only a sizable fragment, but a substantial majority of Christians in that part of the world are linked to Orthodoxy, not the Western church.
Ack, yes. That’s the trouble with audiobooks and writing reviews – I leave placeholders in my drafts to go back and check spelling, and then I sometimes forget to check them all.
Reviewing an audiobook is difficult, period.
It’s actually trickier even than that. The Levant and Egypt were the homelands of Christianity for the first 600-700 years, with Antioch and Alexandria being the foremost intellectual centers until the Muslim conquest. But that also meant that the region saw the earliest splinterings in Christian confessions (well before the East / West split), and these endure to this day. So while yes, these churches were not Western, they were fragmented among themselves. To this day, the largest single split is between the Eastern Orthodox churches, who accepted the council of Chalcedon, and the Oriental Orthodox churches, who did not. And there were other divisions over other issues – the Maronites and Syriacs. Then, due to other political issues, there were Eastern Rite churches in the region who, for protection, switched allegiances to Rome (the Melkites), but still look and sound very Eastern Orthodox, and then the Maronite churches who likewise are under the protection of Rome, but retain still other rites.
The book touches on these issues because the Arabic immigrants all brought their own churches with them, and for linguistic and support reasons often settled near each other, but could not commune together, just as they could not back home (even if they did intermarry a lot). Fr. Nicola sometimes had to put out fights between these otherwise very similar communities, and at other times, out of a lack of a church of their own, people would cross confessional lines for worship services.
This lack of unity in the United States has not been too great an issue – just here in Columbus, my own church lets an Oriental Orthodox church (Indian Thomasite – that is Indians who trace their church all the way back to St. Thomas – yes that Thomas, the “doubter” – he made it as far as the Indus valley) use our building on Saturdays, and there are multiple Ethiopian and Coptic churches in town, as well as a large Melkite church who let my church use their building for years until it could find permanent quarters. But the lack of unity in the Levant has been a cause of great concern in recent decades, and there have been great efforts to mend fences, while there is still time.
I added it to my Kindle queue so I can check out some of the places he traveled to. The places in Nebraska are probably further west than the Nebraska I knew as a kid. But I’m especially curious about his North Dakota travels. A lot of Germans from Russia’s Volga region ended up in North Dakota. I knew some of those when I was a wee tyke, and still remember them. But there is a group I had once assumed to be part of that migration, but which is probably not. There are a lot of Ukrainian names in the rural population just to the west of my birthplace home. I don’t know about any Orthodox church there, but I found it interesting to see (from a local newspaper) some of the Orthodox-like symbolism in a local Baptist church. (I’m pretty sure it was Baptist. I know it wasn’t Lutheran.)
I don’t remember all the towns in North Dakota that he visited, but one did stick out because I had visited it and loved it: Rugby, the geographic center of North America, and home (at least in 1997, when I was there) to a quirky old frontier / Americana museum that was an afternoon’s ramble through… stuff.
I don’t know much about Rugby, though I knew it was there. Drove past it on Hwy 2 a couple of years ago. The book says he went to a community 80 miles to the south of Rugby. The community I was thinking of is to the southwest. The village name is Kief, named after the current capital of Ukraine. (And it’s to the east of where we lived, not the west as I said earlier.) But the community visited by Father Nicola was Syrian, not Ukrainian. If there were still traces of such communities in the late 40s and early 50s, Dad or his brother-in-law (both pastors in the region) might have known about them.
A cousin-in-law of mine was, I think, in a Syriac Orthodox congregation for a time. He knew about them, anyway, and it was from him that I learned there was such a thing. But his family is now in a different Orthodox congregation in southern California.
The best museums are curated by someone who is at least a tad absentminded.
There are community museums that have been improved by professionalism and scholarship, but I hope that the local amateurish museums that express local chauvinism don’t ever go away completely. We need lots of both kinds.
The Rugby museum was wonderful. It wasn’t overdone, it was (mostly) thematically organized (sorta), and you could get close to, and mess with some of what was on display (like the old phone office).