Religion: Diocese No. 8

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Washington, B.C. has never been much more than a sleepy little parish to the Russian Orthodox Church of North America. But as the church has expanded in the U.S., Canada and Alaska to seven dioceses and 400,000 members, its leaders have felt more & more that the U.S. capital rates a bishop.

This week it got one. Garbed in gold vestments and flanked by New York's Metropolitan Leonty—the church's U.S. primate—and the bishops of Alaska and San Francisco, the Very Rev. Archimandrite Jonah was invested as the first Bishop of Washington, in San Francisco's Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral.

Lanky Bishop Jonah, 57, onetime officer in the Czarist army, studied for the priesthood in the U.S. For the past three years he has distinguished himself as dean of San Francisco's cathedral. His Washington diocese will number some 10,000, about 1,000 of them in the city itself.