The Tireless Traveler

After Jackson, Sebastian spent three decades as an itinerant missionary, founding and serving Orthodox parishes across California, the Pacific Northwest, the Mountain West, the Midwest, Alaska, and Canada, and crossing the Atlantic and Pacific dozens of times. He served Serbs, Russians, Greeks, and Arabs without regard to jurisdiction, in mining camps, lumber towns, and cities, earning the title “Father of Serbian Orthodoxy in America” and, from St. Nikolai, the name of “the greatest Serbian missionary of modern times.”

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox / American (glorified 2015)

A Continent as a Parish

Sebastian’s ministry after 1894 has no fixed address; his parish was a continent. Immediately after Jackson he was set to missionary work across California and the Pacific Northwest, and the biographical tradition records him covering thousands of miles to gather and serve the scattered Orthodox of the region — establishing or ministering to communities at Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, Gig Harbor, and Wilkeson, among others (Hieromonk Damascene [Christensen], Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America, St. Herman Press, on the Northwest missionary circuit; OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org, on his continental travels). In 1893–1894 he also served for a time at St. Mary’s Church in Minneapolis, the parish that St. Alexis Toth had led into Orthodoxy, continuing the work among the returning Eastern-rite Rusyns of the upper Midwest (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich; on Toth’s Minneapolis parish see the repository’s Immigrant Era). The willingness to serve a Rusyn convert parish is characteristic: Sebastian went where the mission needed a priest, not only where Serbs were gathered.

A String of Foundations

Across his active decades Sebastian founded or helped establish a remarkable number of parishes. Besides St. Sava’s, Jackson (1894), the record credits him with:

  • St. Sava Church, Douglas, Alaska, consecrated in 1903 during his years as dean of the Sitka deanery — carrying the Serbian dedication even to the far north (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the Douglas church; OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org).
  • Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Church, Chicago, established in 1905 as the center of the new Serbian Mission, with a large congregation present at its first liturgy — the administrative heart of Serbian America (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the Chicago foundation; see The Serbian Mission Under the Russian Archdiocese).
  • St. Sava Church, Los Angeles (1909), and St. Basil of Ostrog Church, Angels Camp, California (consecrated 1910), among his California foundations; and service to communities as far afield as Denver and Butte, Montana, where he is credited with celebrating the first Divine Liturgy for the copper-mining community in 1897 (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the Los Angeles, Angels Camp, Denver, and Butte missions).
  • Serbian communities in Canada, including work connected with St. Nicholas parish, Hamilton, Ontario (c. 1913) (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the Canadian missions).

The precise dating and the exact degree of his role in some of these foundations vary among the sources and are best treated with the modest caution the biographical tradition itself invites; but the pattern — a continent studded with parishes he planted or watered — is beyond dispute and is the substance of his historical achievement (OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org, summarizing the breadth of his foundations).

Crossing the Oceans

Sebastian’s field was not even bounded by North America. The biographical tradition records that he crossed the Atlantic fifteen times and the Pacific nine times in the course of his missionary life — figures that, whatever their exact accuracy, convey a man almost never at rest (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the ocean crossings; OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org). His Pacific voyages brought him into repeated contact with the Orthodox Mission in Japan under St. Nicholas (Kasatkin), the equal-to-the-apostles enlightener of Japan, who is said to have offered Sebastian a permanent place in the Japanese mission — an offer Sebastian declined, his heart being set on the Serbian and American work (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the visits to Japan and St. Nicholas of Japan’s offer). His Atlantic crossings took him to Russia, to Serbia and the Balkans, and, in his last active years, into the wartime service that would draw him permanently back to the Old World (see Chaplain of the Balkan Wars).

Pan-Orthodox by Instinct

What most distinguishes Sebastian’s missionary style is its pan-Orthodox indifference to ethnic and jurisdictional boundaries. He served, the sources agree, Serbs, Russians, Greeks, and Syro-Arabs alike, in mining camps, lumber towns, and remote villages, “without regard to jurisdictional boundaries,” and he is said to have baptized more people than any other Serbian priest in the Western Hemisphere (Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church [Tacoma], “St. Sebastian (Dabovich),” used as locator; OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org). This was not a modern ecumenical program but the natural conduct of a priest of the one pre-1917 Russian Mission, in which the Orthodox of every nation were one flock (see The Russian Mission on the Pacific). It is also of a piece with his reach for English as the common tongue of American Orthodoxy (see Preaching and the English Liturgy): a man who served four nations needed a language they could share, and in America that language was English.

“The Greatest Serbian Missionary of Modern Times”

The scale and spirit of this labor account for the honors his memory carries. He is styled the “Father of Serbian Orthodoxy in America,” and his epitaph named him “the first American Serbian apostle” (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the epitaph). St. Nikolai (Velimirović), who knew him and buried him, called him a “Christian missionary of world-scope” who “traveled restlessly and preached and lectured indefatigably,” and — in the phrase most often quoted — “the greatest Serbian missionary of modern times” (St. Nikolai, as quoted in Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich; see The Last Years and Žiča). These are the tributes of hindsight and of veneration, and the collection reports them as such; but they rest on a documented life of extraordinary mobility and fruitfulness, and they are not extravagant. The traveler who could rarely be found in one place is, by that very restlessness, the man who gave the Orthodox of a whole hemisphere their first churches.

See Also

References

  • Damascene (Christensen), Hieromonk. Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America. Platina, CA: St. Herman Press. (The Northwest, Mountain West, Midwest, Alaskan, and Canadian foundations; the ocean crossings; the visits to St. Nicholas of Japan; the epitaph and St. Nikolai’s tributes.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich.” oca.org — used as locator for the breadth of his travels and foundations.
  • Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church, Tacoma. “St. Sebastian (Dabovich).” orthodoxtacoma.com — used as locator for the pan-Orthodox character of his ministry.
  • Orthodoxy in America (this repository). The Immigrant Era — for St. Alexis Toth’s Minneapolis parish and the wider mission.