Alongside Tikhon and Raphael

Sebastian Dabović labored within the same pre-1917 Russian Mission as St. Tikhon of Moscow and St. Raphael of Brooklyn, and his story must be read together with theirs: three men — a Russian archbishop, an Arab bishop, and an American-born Serbian archimandrite — building one multiethnic American Church. The Russian hierarchy honored Sebastian with its ranks and its decorations, and even the Tsar and the Prince of Montenegro added their own.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox / American (glorified 2015)

Three Builders of One Church

The pre-revolutionary Russian Mission in America produced a remarkable cohort of holy and gifted men, and Sebastian belongs squarely among them. At its head, from 1898, was St. Tikhon (Bellavin), the ruling archbishop who gave the mission its conciliar vision and would become Patriarch of Moscow and a confessor under the Bolsheviks (see St. Tikhon of Moscow). Beside him stood St. Raphael (Hawaweeny) of Brooklyn, the Damascus-descended, Beirut-born Arab archimandrite whom Tikhon consecrated in 1904 as the first Orthodox bishop on American soil, to shepherd the Syro-Arab mission (see St. Raphael of Brooklyn). And among them worked Sebastian Dabović, the American-born Serbian archimandrite whom Tikhon set over the Serbian Mission and elevated in 1905 (Hieromonk Damascene [Christensen], Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, St. Herman Press; see The Serbian Mission Under the Russian Archdiocese).

These three are not merely contemporaries but co-workers in a single enterprise, and the repository’s collections on them agree in their framing of the mission era. St. Raphael’s collection describes his whole American career as unfolding “within a single multiethnic diocese under the Russian mission” and treats his memory as “the symbol of a unity the American Church has not since recovered” (see St. Raphael of Brooklyn). St. Tikhon’s collection tells of the “rapidly expanding multi-ethnic diocese” he governed and the national auxiliary missions he organized within it (see St. Tikhon of Moscow). Sebastian’s Serbian Mission is one thread of exactly that fabric. To read his life as an isolated Serbian story would be to miss its meaning; he is one of the three or four men who, under Tikhon, built the one American Church of the immigrant age.

Parallel Missions, Parallel Methods

The parallels between Sebastian and Raphael are especially close and illuminating. Both were archimandrites of the Russian Mission set over a national flock — Raphael the Arabs, Sebastian the Serbs. Both were ceaseless travelers who covered the continent to gather a scattered people: Raphael “the Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep in America,” establishing some thirty parishes; Sebastian founding churches from Alaska to Chicago to Los Angeles and crossing the oceans dozens of times (see The Tireless Traveler; on Raphael, the repository’s Immigrant Era). Both reached for English where their multilingual flocks and the American setting required it — Raphael blessing the Liturgy in English “where the people needed it,” Sebastian preaching and publishing in English from the 1890s (see Preaching and the English Liturgy). And both are venerated today across the jurisdictions that emerged from the mission they served. The one difference that matters is that Raphael was made a bishop and Sebastian was not: the Serbs, unlike the Arabs, did not receive an American bishop of their own until Mardarije in 1926, after Sebastian’s active American years were over (see The Serbian Mission Under the Russian Archdiocese).

The Honors of the Russian Church — and of Tsar and Prince

The esteem in which the Russian Church held Sebastian is legible in the honors it heaped on him. Beyond his elevation to archimandrite by Tikhon, he was appointed to the North American Ecclesiastical Consistory (the diocesan governing council) around 1900, and he served as dean of the Sitka deanery and superintendent of the Alaskan missions in the years 1902–1904 — positions of real administrative trust within the Russian archdiocese (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the Consistory appointment and the Alaskan deanery). He received a gold cross from Bishop Nicholas as early as 1895, unusually soon in a priest’s career (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich).

His fame reached beyond the American mission to the Orthodox courts of the Old World. The biographical tradition records that he was decorated with the Order of St. Anne by Tsar Nicholas II (given as 1899) and with the Order of Danilo (Daniel) by Prince Nicholas of Montenegro (given as 1897) — honors from the two Orthodox sovereigns most concerned with the Serbs of the diaspora (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the Russian and Montenegrin decorations). These are the marks of a churchman regarded, in his own lifetime, as a figure of consequence in the wider Orthodox world, not merely a local missionary. That he would later auction these very decorations to raise money for the Serbian war-wounded is one of the most telling details of his character (see Chaplain of the Balkan Wars).

A Bridge Between Worlds

What Sebastian uniquely contributed to this cohort was his position as a bridge. Tikhon was a Russian sent to America; Raphael an Arab formed in Damascus, Halki, and Kiev; but Sebastian was a native American by birth and a Serb by blood and a Russian-trained priest by formation — the three identities held in one person (see Jovan Dabović: Early Life and Education). He could speak to the Americanized second generation as one of them, to the Serbs as their own, and to the Russian hierarchy as a trusted son of its mission. In him the several worlds that Tikhon’s diocese tried to hold together were already reconciled in a single life. This is why he could be, at once, the “Father of Serbian Orthodoxy in America” and a pioneer of English-language Orthodoxy and a decorated priest of the Russian Church — and why his glorification, by the Serbian Church, of an American-born priest of the Russian Mission, is so fitting an emblem of the whole pre-1917 enterprise (see The First American-Born Priest-Saint).

See Also

References

  • Damascene (Christensen), Hieromonk. Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America. Platina, CA: St. Herman Press. (The Consistory appointment; the Sitka deanery and Alaskan superintendency 1902–1904; the 1895 gold cross; the Order of St. Anne (1899) and the Order of Danilo (1897); the elevation to archimandrite by Tikhon.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich.” oca.org — used as locator for his offices under Tikhon.
  • St. Raphael of Brooklyn (this repository). README — the framing of the pre-1917 multiethnic mission and the lost unity.
  • St. Tikhon of Moscow (this repository). README — Tikhon’s American years and multiethnic diocese.
  • Orthodoxy in America (this repository). The Immigrant Era — St. Raphael’s mission and Tikhon’s policy.