Dmitri (Royster)

Archbishop Dmitri (Royster) was a hierarch of the Orthodox Church in America, archbishop of Dallas and the South and a missionary to Mexico. He is venerated by the faithful without synodal canonization.

He was born on 2 November 1923 at Teague, Texas, and raised a Southern Baptist. With his sister he searched for "the original scriptural community" and, after reading about the Orthodox Church, they attended Orthros and Divine Liturgy; in 1941 they were received into Orthodoxy at the Greek church of the Holy Trinity in Dallas. He served in the army as a Japanese interpreter on the staff of General MacArthur, then taught Spanish at Southern Methodist University. In 1954 he was ordained a priest and served as rector of Saint Seraphim Church in Dallas until 1969, when he was consecrated bishop of Berkeley. He was then bishop of Washington (1970) and of Hartford and New England (1971).

In 1978 he became the first ruling bishop of the Diocese of the South, with its fourteen states, and from 1972 to 2008 he led the Mexican Exarchate. He was raised to archbishop in 1993 and in 2008 served as locum tenens of the Church until the election of Metropolitan Jonah. Retired in 2009, he reposed in the Lord on 28 August 2011 in Dallas, on the feast of the Dormition by the Julian calendar, his favourite feast. He is sometimes called the Apostle to the South.