Tonsure and Ordination

Jovan Dabović was tonsured a monk with the name Sebastian and ordained deacon in the late 1880s, and ordained to the priesthood on August 16, 1892, by Bishop Nicholas (Ziorov) — becoming, on the reckoning of the Serbian and American churches, the first person born in the United States to be tonsured an Orthodox monk and ordained an Orthodox priest. The sources agree on the priesthood but diverge on the exact dates of the tonsure and diaconate.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox / American (glorified 2015)

The Monk Sebastian

At the end of his studies and early service, Jovan Dabović was tonsured to monastic life and given the name Sebastian, after St. Sebastian the Martyr of Rome (d. c. 288) whose feast the Church keeps in December — a name, not a claim of any connection between the two men beyond patronage (Hieromonk Damascene [Christensen], Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America, St. Herman Press, on the tonsure and the monastic name). His choice of the monastic path rather than marriage and the parish priesthood is itself significant: it left him free for the itinerant missionary life he would lead, unencumbered by a family, and it opened to him the higher monastic ranks — igumen, archimandrite — that a married priest cannot hold. The whole shape of his later career as a travelling missionary and administrator presupposes this early choice of celibate monasticism.

The date and place of the tonsure are disputed in the sources, and the disagreement is not trivial, since it also governs the date of his diaconate. [Disputed: (a) The OCA Life and OrthodoxWiki place the tonsure and the ordination to the diaconate in 1887, at St. Petersburg, during or just after his Russian studies (OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org; OrthodoxWiki, “Sebastian (Dabovich)”). (b) The modern St. Herman Press biography and the accounts depending on it place the tonsure later and in America: December 30, 1888, by Bishop Vladimir (Sokolovsky) at St. Nicholas Church, San Francisco, with ordination to the diaconate on January 1, 1889 (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich; and the Arizona diocesan Life following it). The two reconstructions cannot both be right; the collection reports both and does not adjudicate, noting only that the American 1888/1889 dating rests on the fuller and more recent biographical research.] Whichever dating is correct, by the beginning of 1889 Sebastian was a hierodeacon of the Russian Mission, serving at the San Francisco cathedral and teaching in the mission’s pastoral school (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on his service as deacon and teacher).

Ordination to the Priesthood, 1892

On this the sources are firm and agreed. Sebastian was ordained to the holy priesthood on August 16, 1892 (given in some accounts as August 16/28, reflecting the Old-Style / New-Style difference), by Bishop Nicholas (Ziorov) of the Aleutians and Alaska — the ruling hierarch of the American mission and the same bishop who two years later would consecrate St. Sava’s church at Jackson (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the ordination of August 16, 1892; OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org, giving the same date and consecrator; OrthodoxWiki, “Sebastian (Dabovich)”). With this ordination Sebastian became a hieromonk — a priest-monk — of the Russian Orthodox Mission in North America, at the age of twenty-nine.

The event carries the weight of the collection’s central “first.” On the reckoning that the Serbian and American churches have made their own, Sebastian was the first person born in the United States to be ordained an Orthodox priest, and the first native-born American to be tonsured an Orthodox monk (this is the standard formulation; see OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org; and the 2015 glorification materials of the Serbian Church, spc.rs and westsrbdio.org). The claim must be stated with the precision it requires, and the collection does so in full in the legacy section: it is a claim about birth in the United States, and it stands alongside — not against — the honor of St. Jacob (Netsvetov), the Aleut-Russian priest born in Russian Alaska in 1802, who is venerated as the first Orthodox priest of native Alaskan descent and the first saint born in America in the continental sense (see The Saints of North America, and the full discussion in The First American-Born Priest-Saint). The two “firsts” are distinct and both true; Sebastian’s is the first ordination of a man born within the United States as such.

A Priest of the Russian Mission

It is worth dwelling on the ecclesiastical fact that Sebastian was ordained within the Russian Mission, not by any Serbian church. There was, in 1892, no Serbian Orthodox jurisdiction in America and none in the diaspora; the Serbs of the New World, like the Greeks and the Arabs, were served by and under the Russian archdiocese, the only Orthodox church body then organized on the continent (Stokoe with Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, ch. 2–3; see The Serbian Mission Under the Russian Archdiocese). Sebastian’s orders, his faculties, his assignments, and for years his very salary came from the Russian Church. He was a Serb serving his own people, but he did so as a priest of a Russian-led, pan-Orthodox mission — and he would remain canonically within the Russian jurisdiction, honored by its hierarchy, until the pressures of the First World War released him to serve the Serbian Church directly (see Chaplain of the Balkan Wars).

This canonical fact protects the reader from a common anachronism. Sebastian is rightly called the “Father of Serbian Orthodoxy in America,” but he did not build a Serbian jurisdiction; he built Serbian parishes within, and with the resources of, the unified Russian Mission — the same mission that at the same moment was building Rusyn parishes under St. Alexis Toth and Arab parishes under St. Raphael of Brooklyn. His achievement belongs to the era of the one American Church, before the fragmentation, and that is inseparable from its meaning (see Alongside Tikhon and Raphael).

See Also

References

  • Damascene (Christensen), Hieromonk. Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America. Platina, CA: St. Herman Press. (The tonsure and monastic name; the 1888/1889 American dating of tonsure and diaconate under Bishop Vladimir; the ordination to the priesthood August 16, 1892, by Bishop Nicholas (Ziorov).)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich.” oca.org — the OCA Life: the 1887 dating of tonsure/diaconate, the 1892 priesthood, and the “first American-born” formulation.
  • “Sebastian (Dabovich).” OrthodoxWiki — used as locator for the ordination chronology.
  • Stokoe, Mark, with Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994. Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995, chs. 2–3. (The single Russian-led jurisdiction of pre-1917 American Orthodoxy.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “The Saints of North America” context (oca.org lives of St. Jacob Netsvetov) — used as locator for the distinct “first saint born in America” honor.