Old Orthodox,
A wonderful find on your part - thank you. It wouldn't surprise me to find that Deacon Randy/Diak was already aware of this, but I hadn't seen the photos before now. Paul Wigowsky, whose site it is and who authored the fictional account of Old Believers that appears there, was a bilingual (for Old Believer children whose first language was not English) school teacher in the area of Oregon in which the Old Believer community resides. He apparently has a background in comparative religious studies and has written a couple of other excellent pieces on the Old Believers besides the novelization.
The History of Oregon's Old Believer Community [uoregon.edu]Collection of Old Believer History & Tradition [geocities.com]It is listed on other sites as a place of worship, does Brother Theodore hold services for the local community using the old rite?
If you look through the threads that I linked in my prior post, you'll see that I referenced an Orthodox church titled Our Lady of Tikhvin in the same area of Oregon but couldn't identify the jurisdiction to which it belonged. Regretably, I didn't post any link as to the sites from which I took that info and a search of my bookmarked sites and the web just now didn't yield any results. I think that whatever sites you found (and very likely the ones at which I was looking a few years ago) were indeed referencing the Center. In 1978, Brother Ambrose described the Center itself as housing (providing worship facilities) five parishes (apparently of five different Old Believers soglasies/accords/confessions), as well as the Byzantine (Russian Old Ritualist Greek-Catholic) Chapel of Our Lady of Tikhvin.
Whether the Chapel is still extant, as a house of worship, is open to question and I don't know if the Center continues to house the parishes. The Abbey itself is of the Latin Rite and Church. Its involvement with the Old Believers came about through the goodness and pastoral concern of Abbott Damien (Jentges), of blessed memory, who served in that role for a quarter-century - 1950 to 1974. Apparently, sometime in the early '60s, he became aware of the Old Believer community in the area - which included a small body of
Katolicheskaja Stariobriodtsi, Catholic Old Ritualists (apologies for my probably woefully inadequate transliteration of the Russian) - and was concerned about the need to afford them pastoral care.
In the course of searching for a priest to serve them, he became aware of Hieromonk Feodor, who apparently came from a family that was itself Old Ritualist at some point in history. Father Serge or Diak will likely recollect the particulars of his history - which I recollect was discussed in another thread here that I've been unable to track. My memory is that Father Serge spoke of Father Feodor travelling from western Massachusetts (Stockbridge? or Lenox?) to Oregon to take up ministering to the community.
Brother Ambrose learned Church Slavonic to serve and assist Father and, in addition to the pastoral care provided to the Catholic Old Ritualists, they became well-respected in the broader Old Believer community for their services to it. (
This link [kaga.wsulibs.wsu.edu] offers ten or so documents relative to the Oregon communities, several of which were authored by Brother Ambrose and show his involvement in obtaining needed services for the community, such as translators to work with governmental and social service agencies.) Brother Ambrose himself was never ordained to the presbyterate and, as I mentioned earlier, Hieromonk Feodor reposed some years ago. The Catholic Old Ritualists are believed to have been likely reabsorbed into the other Old Believer communities.
The Center itself was - at one time, at least - under the operational control of "The Old Ritualist Society", although on the Abbey grounds.
I have also heard of an old rite catholic priest in Russia, does anyone know anything about this?
If you check through the links in the earlier threads, you can find historical references to the two priests in the early Russian Greek-Catholic Church who served according to the Old Rite. You should also find some references to the fact that that there is one priest among the present-day Russian Greek-Catholic clergy who serves according to the Old Rite.
Many years,
Neil
