Orthodox Church in America

The second-largest body of Orthodox churches in the United States. It traces its origins to the arrival in Kodiak, Alaska, of eight Orthodox missionaries from Russia in 1794. In the early 1960s, the OCA was known as the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of North America, or The Metropolia. People who joined this group in the 1930s were Eastern Catholics who turned to Orthodoxy after the Vatican forbade them to have married priests in the United States. Today, in addition to the parishes of the former Metropolia, the OCA includes the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate, the Albanian Orthodox Archdiocese and the Bulgarian Orthodox Diocese. In the past two decades the OCA has established more than 220 new parishes, almost all non-ethnic in origin and worshipping only in English. In 1970, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church designated the OCA an autocephalous church, meaning it enjoys autonomy and has the right to elect its own primate, or presiding hierarch. It has its headquarters in Syosset, N.Y. See Eastern Orthodox.