Archbishop Dmitri Royster

Robert Royster grew up in a devout Southern Baptist household in Teague, Texas, and was baptized in that tradition around the age of twelve. As a young man he and his older sister — searching for the fullness of the ancient Church — began, around 1939, to inquire seriously into Orthodox Christianity, receiving instruction from a Greek parish priest in Dallas.

Before converting they sought their mother's blessing; she is remembered for asking the decisive question, “Does the Orthodox Church believe in Christ as Lord and Savior?” Satisfied, she consented. In 1941 the two were received into the Orthodox Church at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Dallas, where they took the baptismal names Dmitri and Dimitra — a lifelong bond of brother and sister in the faith.

Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, Royster trained in Japanese and served as an interpreter, work that later brought him into contact with the Orthodox Church of Japan. After the war he completed his education, earning a master's degree and teaching Spanish at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

A natural linguist, he mastered liturgical Greek and devoted himself to making Orthodox worship intelligible in the languages of the New World. He taught and catechized, translated the services into English and Spanish, and worked among Spanish-speaking Orthodox communities — labor that would later make him a natural apostle of an English-language, American Orthodoxy rooted in place rather than ethnicity.

In 1954, Royster helped establish an English-language mission parish in Dallas dedicated to Saint Seraphim of Sarov. He was ordained to the diaconate on November 2 and to the priesthood on November 6 of that year, and became the fledgling community's rector — a post he held until 1969.

Saint Seraphim's became a seedbed of American mission: the catechetical curriculum Fr Dmitri developed there for inquirers and converts was later published by the OCA's Department of Christian Education as Orthodox Christian Teaching. The parish he founded as a mission would in time become the cathedral of a diocese, and the place of his own funeral and burial.

On June 22, 1969, Fr Dmitri was consecrated Bishop of Berkeley, an auxiliary to the Archbishop of San Francisco. He served successively as Bishop of Washington and as Bishop of Hartford and New England, and from 1972 oversaw the Church's mission in Mexico as Exarch. In 1978 he was called to become the first ruling bishop of the OCA's newly organized Diocese of the South, which he governed from Dallas.

There he found his life's work. Over three decades he crisscrossed the region, planting and nurturing parishes and receiving a steady stream of converts, so that the diocese grew from roughly a dozen communities into more than seventy parishes and missions — one of the OCA's fastest-growing and most convert-rich dioceses. He was elevated to the dignity of archbishop in 1993. Of his refusal to seek higher office he once said plainly, “I didn't want to be Metropolitan anyway. I wanted to come to the south and open a diocese.”

Those who knew Archbishop Dmitri remembered a hierarch of striking humility and warmth — a man who, it was said, “never met a stranger.” He led by example rather than decree, formed parishes through patient personal visits, and insisted on proclaiming Christ first, and then Orthodoxy. His vision was of an “all-American” Orthodoxy that transcended ethnic boundaries and worshipped in the language of the land.

The writer Rod Dreher, a spiritual child of the archbishop, recalled him as “the opposite of everything I had come to expect in a bishop,” and told of the elderly Dmitri bowing before Dreher's three-year-old daughter at Forgiveness Vespers to ask her pardon — a small act that, for many, captured the gentleness and self-effacement that drew people to the faith through him.

After the retirement of Metropolitan Herman in 2008, the Holy Synod named Archbishop Dmitri locum tenens of the OCA until the election of Metropolitan Jonah later that year. Dmitri himself requested retirement, which took effect on March 31, 2009. He reposed in Dallas on August 28, 2011, at the age of 87; his funeral was celebrated at Saint Seraphim Cathedral, the mission he had founded.

When his body was disinterred in March 2016 for reburial within the cathedral, observers widely reported that it appeared little touched by decay — a state that in Orthodox tradition has sometimes been associated with holiness, though the Church alone discerns such matters. Among many who had known him, this deepened an already-present grassroots hope that he might one day be considered for glorification. That sentiment is recorded here as a matter of pastoral fact; no formal act of the Church has been made, and none is implied.

Archbishop Dmitri was one of the most important missionary hierarchs for English-speaking Orthodoxy in the United States — a rare American-born convert bishop whose decades of patient church-planting gave the Orthodox South much of its present shape. Under his leadership the Diocese of the South grew from a dozen communities into more than seventy parishes and missions, drawing a great number of converts through a ministry that proclaimed “Christ first, and then Orthodoxy.”

His significance is also personal and pastoral: a linguist and translator who labored to make the services intelligible in English and Spanish, and a gentle, self-effacing pastor whose humility became, for many, an argument for the faith itself. Among those who knew him a grassroots hope for his eventual glorification has arisen — recorded here as a fact of sentiment, not as an act of the Church — and his memory remains a living presence in the diocese he built.