16,951
edits
Changes
m
link
==Life==
Abp. Nathaniel was born William George Popp on [[June 12]], 1940, in Aurora, Illinois, to a family of Romanian heritage. William was the third of five children in the family of Joseph Popp and Vera nee Boytor who were immigrants from the County of Satu Mare. In 1958, after completing primary and secondary schooling, William entered St. Procopius College in Lisle, Illinois that was a “Pontifical Eastern Rite Center” run by [[Rule of St. Benedict|Benedictine ]] [[monk]]s where he studied the history, origins, and purposes of the Greek Catholic Church. Upon graduation in 1962, William was called to Rome, Italy by the Romanian Greek Catholic bishop, Vasile Cristea, to study at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Athanasium Greek College, studying the rites, canons, and the spiritual life of the Byzantine Rite.
During these college years, William witnessed the activities of the second Vatican council and traveled through Germany and Greece including [[Mount Athos]]. It was at Mount Athos that William first visited an Orthodox Church and expressed the thought, ‘’If only the monks were not Orthodox.” Although deeply moved spiritually, his internal conflict with the history and loyalty to the “Unia” caused him to keep Orthodoxy at a distance. It was at Mount Athos that one of the spiritual fathers “bestowed” on him the name “Nathaniel.”
