Brooklyn Street Renamed in Honor of Orthodox Priest

One of the streets in New York (USA) was called “Father Paul Schneirla Way” after Archpriest Paul Schneirla (+ 2014), an Orthodox priest.

According to the decision of the New York City Council, several dozen city objects received second (additional) names, reported radonezh.ru.

Thus, the intersection of Ridge Boulevard and 81st Brooklyn Street, on which the Church of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos of the Antioch Orthodox Church is located, was named after Father Paul.

It was in this church that Archpriest Paul Schneirla was senior priest from 1951 to 2002.

It is noted that Father Paul played a significant role in the spread of Orthodoxy in the United States.

He was born in 1916 in Alaska and already in his youth converted from Protestantism to Orthodoxy. After graduating from St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary, Father Paul taught the Old Testament for many years there.

According to the memoirs of priest Anthony Gabriel, in the 1960s, Archpriest Paul Schneirla was the only professor in the seminary who was born in America, because all the rest were mostly representatives of Russian church emigration (priests Alexander Shmeman, John Meyendorf, George Florovsky, professor Sergey Verkhovskoy and others).

It is emphasized that it was “life experience and a deep understanding of the mentality of Americans” that helped Father Paul to work with students who grew up in the United States.

Also, largely thanks to the efforts of this priest in North America, it was allowed to establish the so-called parishes of “Western rite”, what helped to attract Catholics to Orthodoxy, as well as Anglicans and followers of other Protestant denominations.

It is reported that this case is not the only one in the US when the street gets its name in connection with Orthodoxy. So, in May 2019, the Holy Trinity Avenue appeared in Baltimore (Maryland), named after the church of the Moscow Patriarchate located there. And, for example, in Jersey City (New Jersey) there is a street called “The Way of St. Alexander Hotovitsky” next to the Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul of the Orthodox Church in America.

Translated by The Catalogue of Good Deeds
Source: https://foma.ru/v-nyu-jorke-nazvali-uliczu-v-chest-pravoslavnogo-svyashhennika.html

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