The Russian Mission on the Pacific

After the 1867 sale of Alaska, the Russian Orthodox mission that had begun at Kodiak in 1794 followed its people and its commerce southward into the continental United States, transferring its consistory and then its episcopal see to San Francisco. There it gathered Russians, Greeks, Serbs, Syro-Arabs, and Slavs into a single multiethnic parish — the church of Sebastian Dabović’s boyhood and the institution that would ordain and send him.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox / American (glorified 2015)

From Kodiak to California

Orthodox Christianity reached North America as a Russian monastic mission to the Aleut and Alutiiq peoples of Alaska, beginning with the arrival of the eight-monk Valaam mission at Kodiak in 1794 (see the repository’s Alaska mission and the compendia on St. Herman of Alaska and St. Innocent of Alaska). For most of the nineteenth century the center of gravity of that mission lay in Russian America, with its cathedral at Sitka. The 1867 sale of Alaska to the United States changed the calculus: as the Russian-American Company withdrew and populations shifted, the Church found that a growing share of the Orthodox faithful on the Pacific coast lived not in Alaska but in California (John H. Erickson, Orthodox Christians in America, Oxford, 1999, ch. 2; Stokoe with Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, ch. 2).

The administrative structure moved to follow them. In 1870 the Holy Synod of the Church of Russia created the Diocese of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, and it placed the diocesan chancery (the Spiritual Consistory) in San Francisco, while the bishop’s see for the moment remained at Sitka. In 1872 Bishop John (Mitropolsky) formally transferred the episcopal see itself to San Francisco (OCA, “150th Anniversary of the Establishment of the North American Diocesan See in San Francisco,” used as locator; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 2; and, for the same chronology, the repository’s Immigrant Era). For a generation, until the see moved on to New York in 1905, San Francisco was the headquarters of Orthodoxy in America — and Jovan Dabović grew up in its shadow, in its cathedral parish.

One Parish for Many Peoples

The San Francisco parish was, of structural necessity, pan-Orthodox. There were nowhere near enough of any single nationality to sustain separate ethnic churches, so the Russian-supported cathedral gathered Russians, Greeks, Serbs, Montenegrins, Dalmatians, and, increasingly, Arabic-speaking Syrians into one congregation, served in Church Slavonic and Greek with whatever accommodations the mixed flock required (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America, ch. 2, on the multiethnic San Francisco parish; Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the community of Sebastian’s youth). This was the ordinary condition of pre-1917 American Orthodoxy: a single missionary diocese under the Russian Church, holding many peoples together — a unity that would fracture only after the Russian Revolution cut the diocese off from its mother church (see The Fragmentation After 1917 and the repository’s Twentieth-Century Fragmentation).

For a boy of Sebastian’s generation this arrangement was simply how the Church was. He would have served at the altar and sung in the choir alongside Russians and Greeks, learned Church Slavonic as the liturgical language of a Serbian family, and absorbed the assumption that a priest of this mission served the Orthodox of every nation who came to him. The later shape of his ministry — a Serb ordained in the Russian Mission who served Russian, Serbian, Greek, and Arab parishes across the continent and reached for English as the neutral common tongue — is unintelligible apart from this formation (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the pan-Orthodox character of his upbringing and ministry).

The Mission’s Institutions

The Russian Mission in San Francisco was not merely a parish but a small ecclesiastical establishment with the ambition, chronically underfunded, of training native clergy. Under Bishop John (Mitropolsky) a missionary school — sometimes called the “Graeco-Russian Seminary” — was relocated from Sitka to San Francisco, offering instruction in Russian, Church Slavonic, and Greek to the sons of the mission’s faithful (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the mission school Sebastian attended). It was in this school, alongside the ordinary San Francisco public schooling of an American boy, that Jovan Dabović received his first churchly and linguistic formation. The mission also depended, as it always had, on clergy trained in Russia; and the natural path for a promising native candidate ran from the San Francisco school to the theological academies of St. Petersburg and Kiev — the path Sebastian would take (see Jovan Dabović: Early Life and Education).

The mission’s clergy on the coast in these decades included the bishops under whom Sebastian would be tonsured and ordained — Bishop Vladimir (Sokolovsky) and Bishop Nicholas (Ziorov), the latter the very hierarch who would consecrate St. Sava’s, Jackson (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 2–3). The mission thus supplied Sebastian not only with his childhood church but with the hierarchy, the schooling, the ordination, and the first assignments of his whole career. He was, in the fullest sense, a son and a product of the Russian Mission on the Pacific — a Serb by blood who owed his priesthood to the Russian Church, and who never ceased to acknowledge the debt.

The Pacific as a Mission Field

One further feature of the setting shaped him decisively. The Russian Mission on the Pacific understood itself as a mission — an outpost of evangelization on a frontier, not a settled national church tending an established flock. Its horizon reached across the ocean: Alaska to the north, the Russian homeland across the sea, and, beyond, the Orthodox mission in Japan under St. Nicholas (Kasatkin), with which the American mission had regular contact through the same trans-Pacific shipping lanes (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the Pacific horizon of the mission and Sebastian’s later ties to the Japan mission). A boy formed in this mission absorbed a missionary conception of the priesthood as such: the priest goes out to gather the scattered and to preach where the Church is not yet planted. That conception, and not merely his particular Serbian loyalties, is what made Sebastian a lifelong itinerant who crossed the Atlantic and Pacific dozens of times. The Pacific mission gave him not only his orders but his vocation’s very shape (see The Tireless Traveler).

See Also

References

  • Erickson, John H. Orthodox Christians in America: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, ch. 2.
  • Stokoe, Mark, with Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994. Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995, chs. 2–3.
  • Damascene (Christensen), Hieromonk. Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America. Platina, CA: St. Herman Press. (The San Francisco mission, its school, its hierarchs, and its pan-Orthodox and missionary character.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “150th Anniversary of the Establishment of the North American Diocesan See in San Francisco.” oca.org — used as locator for the 1870/1872 transfer of consistory and see.