Fr. Michael Gelsinger

Gelsinger was born on January 14, 1890, in Reinhold, Pennsylvania, and raised in the German-American Lutheran world of eastern Pennsylvania; he took his bachelor's degree at Muhlenberg College, a Lutheran school, in 1910, followed by a master's from Harvard and, later, a doctorate. After teaching posts at Carthage College, a New York collegiate school, and the College of William and Mary, he joined the faculty of the University of Buffalo in 1929 as a professor of Greek and Latin, where he would remain for the rest of his academic life, holding the Andrew V. V. Raymond chair of classics and chairing the department in the 1950s.

By this time he had already become Orthodox. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1922, and for most of his career carried on a double vocation — university professor during the week, Orthodox priest and liturgical scholar in his parish and study. He served in the Antiochian Archdiocese, including at a Syrian-Antiochian parish in the Niagara Falls area, and was raised to mitred archpriest in 1947. Commentators describe him as one of the most influential convert clergymen in early American Orthodox history.

Gelsinger's lasting contribution grew out of a conviction shared with a small circle of early American Orthodox: that the Church's worship should be available in the language of a rising American-born generation. A trained classicist and student of Byzantine liturgics and hymnology, he set about adapting Greek and Slavic liturgical melodies to English texts that could actually be sung. In 1938 he and his wife Mary published a Handbook for Orthodox Sunday Schools, issued with the blessing of Metropolitan Antony Bashir.

The following year the Antiochian Archdiocese published his Orthodox Hymns in English (1939), melodies adapted from the Russian and Greek traditions with their texts. Several of its hymns remain in use in English-speaking Orthodox parishes, and his translations underlay some of the earliest complete English settings of the Divine Liturgy — making him a foundational figure in a movement that would only fully flower after his death.

Gelsinger's career intersected with one of the most contested episodes in early American Orthodox history. In 1927 Archbishop Aftimios (Ofiesh) — a successor of Bishop (later Saint) Raphael of Brooklyn — was commissioned by the Russian diocese in North America to charter an English-speaking American Orthodox Catholic Church for the growing number of Orthodox Christians born in the United States. Gelsinger, an American-born priest ordained in the early 1920s, was among the small group who assisted Aftimios in the project; like his colleagues he was troubled by the loss of Orthodox young people to Roman Catholic and Episcopal parishes.

The experiment was short-lived and remains controversial. It never won broad recognition among the established Orthodox jurisdictions, and it effectively collapsed after Aftimios's 1933 marriage, canonically irregular for a bishop, ended his standing. Historians continue to debate the movement's canonical legitimacy and legacy; the account here is offered as history rather than endorsement. Gelsinger's own aim throughout — a united, indigenous, English-speaking American Orthodoxy — outlasted the failed structure.

That aim resurfaced in the Second World War. With Fr. Boris Burden, Gelsinger helped organize the Federated Orthodox Greek Catholic Primary Jurisdictions in America, a coalition drawing together several Orthodox jurisdictions to secure legal recognition of Orthodox clergy — draft exemptions and military chaplaincies — from the U.S. government. The occasion was pointed: the Selective Service had moved to draft Gelsinger's own son, and the two priests set out to demonstrate that the Orthodox Church in America was an organized, recognizable body.

The effort scored an early success — federal recognition of Orthodox clergy in late 1942 — and was incorporated in New York in 1943. But the Federation fractured quickly over questions of leadership and practice; the Russian jurisdiction withdrew in 1944, and it was effectively defunct by 1945. Like the earlier venture, it left Gelsinger's guiding vision of Orthodox unity in America unrealized in his lifetime, yet articulated for those who came after.

In his later years, a widower and retired from teaching, Gelsinger embraced the monastic life, receiving tonsure and the priest-monk's name Theodore. He is remembered as ending his days in a monastery, having given his long life first to the classroom and then, more and more, to the Church's worship. He reposed in 1980.

His memory rests less on office than on labor: the patient, scholarly work of making Orthodox hymnody sing in English. That work, begun when English-language Orthodoxy was barely imaginable, helped prepare the ground for a Church that a later generation of American converts would find already partly built.

Father Michael Gelsinger occupies a modest but genuine place in the story of Orthodox Christianity in America: a scholarly convert who insisted, decades ahead of the broad movement, that the Church's worship could and should be sung in English. His Orthodox Hymns in English (1939) and his translations helped seed the first complete English settings of the Divine Liturgy, and elements of his hymnody are still in parish use — a quiet, durable legacy carried on by later generations.

His life also runs through the tangled institutional history of early American Orthodoxy — the failed American Orthodox Catholic Church under Archbishop Aftimios and the wartime federation of jurisdictions — episodes historians still debate and which are recounted here without endorsement. Across both his scholarship and his church politics, the same aim recurs: a united, indigenous, English-speaking American Orthodoxy that would only take fuller shape after his repose in 1980, when the former professor had become the Hieromonk Theodore.