REPELLA, REV. ARCHIMANDRITE ANTHONY (Jan. 21, 1883 -- June 15, 1957)First monk of St. Tikhon's Monastery. Whether it set the stage for the first church with onion-shaped domes and three-bar crosses in the dwindling borough of abandoned coal mines, the Repella family, originally among the minorities in Rostoka Wielka, Poland, has lived continuously in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, since 1892 and longer than two Polish parishes. The surname comes from a Polish word for insult and has many variants. Their mother tongue, however, was not Polish. It was not Russian, either. It was in between and was called, like a semantics game, Carpatho Russian, Little Russian, Ruthenian, Rusyn, Ukrainian, or something else, at different times.
Actually, the mother of the clan that settled in Mount Carmel, one of the towns with the highest ratio of churches and mergers in the United States, was Polish, which makes the Repellas, I suppose, an ecumenical family. Four of her children were born in the hard coal belt, and every industry in Mount Carmel used their labor. Mary, named after her mother, worked in a cigar factory. John, named after his father, worked in bakery shop, and another son worked in a silk mill. Every one whom I have mentioned and omitted has a story. Not to mention the link to Poland through their surname.
It's hard to find where Anthony and the older children in the family really grew up. Although born in Rostoka Wielka, Anthony was not typical of the young men who emigrated to Mount Carmel. On September 1, 1904, he paid about $16 for the voyage on the Frankfurt, a 7,431 gross ton steamship, from Bremen, Germany, where the steamship line (North German Lloyd) was based, to Baltimore, Maryland. He spent 17 days packed like a sardine in a can among hundreds of men, women, and children in steerage. As the Frankfurt passed Fort McHenry in Baltimore, the American flag flying over it probably lifted Repella's spirits.
Upon arrival in Mount Carmel, Anthony Repella found his people in a great deal of turmoil about their own religion. Although the Repella family attended a Byzantine church, now known as Sts. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Catholic Church and affiliated with the Ukrainian Archdiocese of Philadelphia, it was not one it preferred. The church was attached to the pope in Rome. His family were followers of the Rev. Alexis Toth (canonized St. Alexis in May 1994), originally a Ruthenian Catholic priest, who, after he was not accepted in Minneapolis, cast his lot with the Russian Orthodox church in 1892. He took 361 Eastern-Rite Catholics with him. Moving to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he erected a Russian Orthodox church, he continued his efforts to convert the Uniates in the United States, or whatever Eastern-Rite Catholics were called, to Eastern Orthodoxy. Thousands more, including half of the Sts. Peter and Paul parish in Mount Carmel, would follow him. In 1916, seven years after Protopresbyter Toth's death, the American leaders of the Russian Orthodox movement claimed that it had gained 163 Eastern-Rite parishes with over 100,000 members.
Meanwhile, in the closing days of May, 1904, the primate of the Russian Orthodox church in the United States, visited two or three farms in picturesque Wayne County, up in the Pennsylvania mountains, and selected one, almost three miles from a railroad, for a monastic community and orphanage. Then, while St. Tikhon's Monastery and Orphanage was under construction, the railroad company established a flag station to serve the new facility and named it South Canaan after the township in which it was located. Hence Anthony Repella was the first one to study theology at the new institution. In the afternoon of October 11, 1905, when the superior, who would become the first Russian saint in American history, returned to the brand new cloister in Pennsylvania, Repella and others, all in religious garb, dropped to their knees and covered the primate's hands with kisses. The first two orphans, with their superiors, offered him salt and bread.
Never before in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, did anyone see such an apostle of religion as the tall patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church in America with long hair and dressed in a warm blue cassock and colorful hat. He attracted attention wherever he traveled. He liked train rides, trout fishing, and visited the two-story monastery while Repella was there. Usually he slept in a small room on the second floor over the orphan's quarters. He blessed the books Repella used in his studies. He prayed at the site of a future church, marked by a three-barred cross, and a cemetery. The divinity student from Mount Carmel never forgot the visits of a future saint to the monastery. St. Tikhon, as he would be called, returned to consecrate the church on May 17/30, 1906, and three more times the same year, first in July for a vacation and, secondly, on August 11th to tonsure Repella. During his vacation he cut firewood in the forest, worked on the farm, picked cucumbers, tended to the bees, and "assisted in construction projects by fetching boards and pounding nails." On September 14th, he ordained Repella to the diaconate at the monstery and two or three years later Porphry Rozhdestvensky, who received the name Platon when he took monastic vows in 1894 and succeeded Tikhon in 1907, ordained Repella to the priesthood.
To start his pastoral career, Igumen Repella was assigned in 1909 to St. Michael's Orthodox Church in Jermyn, a village in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, where coal mining was the main industry, and was its first full-time pastor. Under his leadership and guidance, the parish began a new building to take the place of the first church that was destroyed by fire. Before the second edifice was completed, the monk was transferred to St. Michael's church in Mount Carmel. In the interim, the parishioners used St. James Episcopal Church in Jermyn for divine services.
Little is known of many assignments. According to his obituary in the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader, the pastorage in Jermyn was followed by charges of St. Michael's in Mount Carmel; St. Michael's, in Portage, Pennsylvania, where in 1915, the Orthodox parish raised a yellow brick structure with only one dome; and SS Cyril and Methodius, Terryville, Connecticut. Other sources revealed that he was an assistant to the archbishop at St. Nicholas's Cathedral in Wilkes-Barre on October 5, 1915, when he filed a petition for naturalization, and was pastor of the Russian Orthodox church in Mount Carmel in 1917.
St. Michael's has served its purpose in Mount Carmel very well. When the pillars of the parish broke away from Sts. Peter and Paul, they bought two small houses and razed one at the end of West Avenue to make way for the church. The other one on Willow Street was used as a rectory. Because good things like wine take time, the interior of the church, erected in 1908, wasn't decorated until 1913. The altar cross was a gift of the Russian Czar Nicholas 11. The three domes, each one smaller than the one in front of it, looked like silver giant-sized onions in the sky, and naturally, in 1931, when Mount Carmel erected a high school stadium near St. Michael's church, it was nicknamed the silver bowl. It was also the first high school stadium to have lighting for night games.
St. Michael's has stood the test of time for more than a century and has annually attracted countless visitors from other Orthodox parishes in the country. The first priest commuted from Wilke Barre to hold divine services in Mount Carmel. St. Michael's parish obtained the services of Repella for only a short period in 1917. Later he and his younger brother, Rev. Basil Repella, who came from Rostoka Wielka in 1906, returned to St. Michael's to bury a loved one in the family, attend a wedding, or simply a reunion.
Last but not least, the older brother was pastor of St. John the Baptist Russian Orthodox Church in Edwardsville, across the river from Wilkes-Barre, from April 18, 1918, to June 15, 1957. He was elevated to the rank of Archimandrite in 1932. He spoke French, Spanish, Latin, Lithuanian, Italian, German, Greek, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and Arabic. Before his death he donated his library containing 5,000 books to St. Vladimir Academy in New York City.
He was active in community affairs and maintained a keen interest in the schools of Luzerne County. For 35 years, he attended the yearly graduation exercises of Edwardsville High School. His grave lies in St. Tikhon's Cemetery.
Edward Pinkowski (2011) [email protected] -- assisted by Thomas Duszak