Jacob (Thumbes)

Roy Thumbes was born August 30, 1887 in Winfield, Kansas, and was the ninth out of ten children of a US Civil War veteran Anson Thumbes and Canadian immigrant Hannah Elizabeth Nichols. Although his parents baptized him as a child, Roy did not show significant interest in religion in his youth ^[1] .

His childhood and youth passed on a farm, but at that time Winfield became the Kansas Flint Hills railway junction and its population reached 5,000 by 1900. Carried away by trains, the young Roy went to work as a loader on the railway and visited various parts of the country ^[1] .

In 1910 he married and the very next year they had a son named Farrell. The family first moved to Missouri , but by 1920 they were living in the seventh district of Chicago ^[1] .

From 1915 to 1923 he served as a missionary and organizer of Bible and Sunday schools in the Protestant Church in several states. In 1923, doubting Protestantism, he studied Roman Catholicism for some time. This study led him to become acquainted with the Orthodox Church ^[2] .

He was co-owner of the Toombs-Daley brokerage house on LaSalle Street, and an investment banker in Downers Grove. In 1927, he was elected president of the International Life Insurance Company in St. Louis , Missouri. But already in 1928, the outbreak of scandal put an end to his successful career ^[1] .

The figure of non-canonical Orthodoxy

He gained further acquaintance with the Orthodox Church through a study of the works on Orthodoxy published in the United States with the blessing of Patriarch Tikhon during his administration of the Russian Orthodox Diocese in America ^[1] .

In 1933, he joined the “Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church” in North America, founded by Metropolitan Plato and Bishop Euthymius (Ofesheus) . June 16, 1940 ordained to the priesthood ^[2] .

In 1942, Roy Thumbes registered the project, designating his profession as “priest of the Holy Orthodox Church in America,” an independent Orthodox church led by George Winslow Plummer of New York. HOCiA built its succession to the non-canonical American Orthodox Catholic Church Euthymius (Ofeisha) through Ignatius (Nichols) . Plummer ordained Theodotus DeWitow (Stanislav Vitovsky) in 1936, who in turn ordained Thumbes on January 30, 1944, after which the latter became Primate of HOCiA.

During World War II , Roy Thumbes is said to have worked in US intelligence . Around this time, Thumb's articles appeared in Plummer’s Rosicrucian journal Mercury.

By this time, Thumbes remarried a woman named Maryangela, who founded the Better Human Resources Movement, based on an analysis of the Hawthorne experiments her stepson Farrell helped to conduct.

On January 30, 1944, James Thumbes was ordained bishop by Bishop Mark (Grover). ^[2]

Archbishop Jacob moved to New York and by 1947 transferred his mission to Spassky Cathedral on 226 West 69th Street in Manhattan . He became a member of the “wandering bishops” of John Hrikhzostom More-Moreno, ordained in 1933 by Bishop Sofrony (Bechara) in Los Angeles , and on April 14, 1951 founded the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church in America ^{[ 3]} .

To get acquainted with Orthodoxy, he used the help of the Orthodox priest of the American Metropolis, Archpriest Damian Kregel. He conducted extensive missionary correspondence throughout America ^[2] .

Around that period, he met and became close friends with Vitaly (Maksimenko) , Archbishop of East America and Jersey-Sits, chief bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in North America. It is believed that after the events in 1947 at the Cleveland Cathedral, when the North American Metropolis left the ROCOR, Thumb played a decisive role due to his old military ties to influence the decision of the federal government to dismiss the complaint of the North American Metropolis against the relocation of First Hierarch Metropolitan Anastasius (Gribanovsky) and the ROCA Synod in the USA from Europe in 1949. During this time, Farrell was ordained a priest by his father named Thomas.

At the ROCA

On October 26, 1949, on behalf of Archbishop Vitaly (Maksimenko) James Tumbes, priest Kirill Zaitsev and Dean of Holy Trinity Seminary prof. N. N. Alexandrov. They examined in detail the James Church, listened to the divine services in it, and made “the most favorable impression”, presenting a Detailed Report to the Synod of Bishops ^[2] . In May 1950, James's petition was submitted to the Council of Bishops for consideration, as was reported to James, who, for his part, expressed complete readiness to wait for a resolution of this issue. On August 23 of the same year, Bishop Nikon (Rklitsky), on behalf of the American Department of the Pre-Council Commission, visited James, got acquainted with his intentions and organization of his organization in detail, and discussed with him the draft of his work if he was accepted into the Russian Orthodox Church in America ^[2] .

On December 6, 1950, the ROCOR Council of Bishops, upon hearing the report of Bishop Nikon (Rklitsky), welcomed “the good intention of the archbishop James Tumbes to join the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and to contribute to his feasible missionary work the cause of the spread of Orthodoxy in America. " By then, he was managing two wards — one in New York City and the other in Chicago . In the parish in New York, there were two priests and one deacon, and one priest in Chicago ^[2] .

The mentorship of Archbishop Vitaly raised the issue of canonicality at the EOCC, prompting Thumbes and his second wife Marian Angela to take monastic tonsure at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville in early July 1951.

On July 21, in the New Root Desert in Magopack, New York, on the feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul the Days, James (Thumbes) was consecrated bishop of Manhattan , vicar of the Eastern American and Jersey-Sith diocese . The consecration was performed by the First Hierarch of the ROCOR Metropolitan Anastasiy (Gribanovsky) , Archbishop of East America Vitaly (Maksimenko) , Archbishop of West Europe John (Maksimovich) , Bishop of Florida Nikon (Rklitsky) and Bishop of Trinity Seraphim (Ivanov) .

Bishop Jacob, who became the first Bishop of Manhattan, was tasked with leading the autonomous American Orthodox Mission in the bosom of the ROCA, for which he was allowed by the Synod to remain short-haired and clean-shaven.

Following his admission to the ROCOR, Gregory and John Adair filed a lawsuit against Bishop Jacob with a view to rejecting the Spassky Cathedral on West 69th Street. Fearing that the case would end in Jacob's favor, the Adair brothers claimed that the building was the property of the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church. There is speculation that a canon lawyer from the North American Metropolis came to the aid of the EOCC and helped them seize the church in 1952, which was later sold for a lot of money to make way for the Lincoln Center . For the rest of his life, Archbishop Jacob served in the chapel of the Holy Apostles, built in his house.

At the Bishop’s Council in 1953, Bishop Jacob announced that he single-handedly changed the practice of Catholic reception, making a report on the occasion that the American Orthodox Mission accepted all converts through baptism, while before the revolution in Russia, they simply accepted Catholicism from Catholicism through confession. The change met no resistance ^[1] .

“The method of missioning Archbishop Jacob and his clergy consists mainly in visiting houses. If they are not accepted, they leave. If they express interest, they leave the missionary literature. To do this, Chicago and New York are divided into quarters. Letters are also sent. Up to 800 calls are sent to the Nativity of Christ, which contain basic information about the Orthodox faith, as well as requests for help ” ^[4] .

He served Metropolitan Anastasius together with other bishops during the consecration of Averky (Taushev) as bishop of Syracuse in 1953. He took part in the meetings and celebrations of the Council of Bishops in the Holy Trinity Monastery and the New Root Desert , as well as in meetings of the Synod of Bishops.

Bishop Jacob succeeded in attracting American believers, but the language barrier between American and Russian immigrants made many things difficult outside the Mission. Those who wanted to study at Holy Trinity Theological Seminary in Jordanville could study only with Archpriest Adrian Rymarenko or Archimandrite Lazar (Moore) , who helped translate training materials for seminarians. The ex-wife of Archbishop Jacob Macriangel was unable to live in the Russian-speaking Holy Assumption Monastery New Diveevo in Nanuet, in connection with which she was allowed to live separately on the second floor of her apartment.

However, his bishopric was not without contradictions. Archbishop James's past connections with the esoteric Masonic Christianity of George Winslow Plummer, reminiscent of theosophy that raged in pre-revolutionary Russia , and contacts with wayward and wandering bishops led to rumors of occult practices occurring in the Mission. Another seductive issue was housing, as Bishop Jacob and his ex-wife were forced to live together. In addition, for many representatives of the Russian emigration who washed the ROCA exclusively as a Russian church, translations of services in English were unacceptable, which exacerbated the apparent isolationism of the American Orthodox Mission. Protopresbyter George Grabbe led the opposition against Bishop Jacob and persuaded several members of the Synod of Bishops to his side.

By 1955, Bishop Jacob expressed to Metropolitan Anastasius (Gribanovsky) a desire to continue his missionary work as a hierarch of an independent American Church ^[5] . October 21, 1955 was put to rest ^[6] . Metropolitan Anastasius at the 1956 Council noted: “Archbishop Jacob did not give all the information about himself completely before the consecration and that Archimandrite Lazar, who professed him as a protege, missed presenting him with some questions relating to determining his legal capacity. After the trial of this case in the Synod of Bishops, it was decided to dismiss Archbishop Jacob at rest with the right to perform services only in secret. Of course, he was very depressed by this outcome and completely stopped all work ” ^[7] .

In the split

In 1959, Bishop Jacob dissociated himself from the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and founded his own jurisdiction - the “Orthodox American Church,” also called the “Holy Orthodox Catholic Apostolic American Church”), which included the concept of Better Human Relations Movement. Over the next decade, Archbishop Jacob continued to manage his two-parish mission aimed at converting Americans to Orthodoxy and translating any church texts into English. He was known as a kind, patient shepherd, was the confessor of a number of Orthodox bishops in New York ^[1] .

On April 25, 1970, shortly before his death, he appointed his disciple John Schneider to the bishop, who joined the mission in 1952, was ordained deacon in November 1961, and priest in July 1962.

After his state of health deteriorated completely, Marianjela began to take care of Jacob until his death, which followed on November 1, 1970. At his funeral was attended by the Bulgarian Metropolitan of New York, Andrei (Petkov) ^[1] .

For a long time, despite the imposed bans, the Orthodox American Church considered itself an autonomous Mission of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.

• Orthodox American Church
• orthodoxwiki: James (Toombs) of Manhattan