Jerome

Jerome Shaw, born John Robert Shaw and commonly known as Bishop Jerome (born December 21, 1946), is a retired bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. He was formerly the auxiliary bishop of Manhattan. He is a Slavist, theologian and polyglot, adherent of the Western Rite Orthodoxy. Life John Robert Shaw was born on December 21, 1946, and grew up in a small New England town. He came of an old American family, of "Anglo" ancestry, and was raised in the Episcopal Church. Interested in languages from an early age, he began learning Russian and Greek from the time he was 14. At first, he did not see the connection between these languages and religion, but as he became more curious about Anglicanism, he came to believe that just as the Church of England had broken away from Rome, so in turn had the Roman Catholic Church originated as one of the Orthodox patriarchates but separated and made changes in its teachings. From age 16, his curiosity about these things began to turn into a serious quest for the "true church". That year, he began immersing himself in everything he could read about Orthodox Christianity and discovered that one of his schoolmates, Dmitry Rimsky, was of Russian Orthodox background. Rimsky's father, Fyodor Rimsky, was a parishioner of the Synodal Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign in Manhattan, and although he did not attend services too often, he recommended the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia to Shaw and promised to take him there the next time he went.