Saint Sebastian (Dabovich) of Jackson

Saint Sebastian was born Jovan Dabović in San Francisco in 1863, the child of Serbian immigrants from the Bay of Kotor — making him one of the very first Orthodox Christians born in the United States. Raised in the faith in a city that was then a frontier of Orthodoxy in America, he felt early the call to serve God. He went abroad for his theological formation, studying in Russia, and in time was tonsured a monk with the name Sebastian.

He became the first person born in the United States to be ordained an Orthodox priest, and among the first of Serbian descent anywhere to enter the priesthood. From the beginning his vocation was missionary. Under the Russian bishops who then governed Orthodoxy in America — including Saint Tikhon — he was given charge of the Serbian Orthodox mission, and he ranged tirelessly across the vast American West, from California to the mining towns of Nevada, Colorado, and beyond, gathering the scattered Serbs, Russians, and other Orthodox into parishes.

A fervent preacher and writer, he labored to explain and defend the Orthodox faith in English to an American audience that scarcely knew it, publishing sermons and books. He helped organize the first Serbian Orthodox parishes in the New World and is remembered as a founder of organized Serbian church life in America. His energy seemed inexhaustible, and his love for souls drove him across continents.

For Saint Sebastian’s mission was not confined to America. He traveled widely — to Serbia and the Balkans, and as far as Japan — and during the Balkan Wars and the First World War he served as a chaplain to Serbian soldiers, sharing the hardships of war. He spent his later years in the lands of his ancestors, continuing to preach and to serve, ever a missionary and a monk.

He reposed on November 30, 1940, at the historic monastery of Žiča in Serbia, far from the city of his birth, having given his whole life to the spread of the Gospel. In 2015 the Serbian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint, together with Saint Mardarije, and his relics were later translated back to the United States — to the very land he had evangelized — finding their home at a monastery in Jackson, California. Honored as an “Apostle to America” and the first American-born Orthodox priest, Saint Sebastian Dabovich stands as a bridge between the Old World and the New: proof that this continent could not only receive the faith, but raise up its own apostles to carry it.

Saint Sebastian wrote that he wished only to be useful to the Church of God, and his life answered that wish without reserve. He belonged fully neither to the Old World nor to the New, but gave himself to both, carrying the faith of his ancestors to the American frontier and the zeal of the missionary back to the lands of his fathers. In him the Orthodox Church in America honors one of her own first-fruits — a son of this soil who became an apostle, and a pledge that holiness can take root and flower in the New World.