By the grace of God, The Rev. Dn. Matthew (Galen) Wiley was ordained to the holy priesthood on the great feast of Pentecost, Sunday, June 8. His Eminence Metropolitan Saba of the Archdiocese of New York and All North America (AOCANA) presided over Fr. Matthew’s ordination at St. Mary Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church in Hunt Valley, MD.
The Rev. Matthew Wiley graduated from St. Vladimir’s Seminary in May as the valedictorian of the class of 2025. Several members of the seminary community attended his ordination, including faculty member The Very Rev. Dr Bogdan G. Bucur, classmates, and alumni.
Fr. Matthew hails from Santa Barbara, CA. He earned an undergraduate degree in film at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and later worked as a technical writer for a software company. Earlier in life, Fr. Matthew practiced Orthodox Judaism. He eventually found himself drawn to Orthodox Christianity, partly due to an encounter with an elderly Orthodox Christian man at an airport. Fr. Matthew eventually decided to attend services at a nearby Orthodox parish, St. Athanasius Antiochian Orthodox Church in Goleta, CA, and discovered the elderly man he had met at the airport was a priest there! Fr. Matthew was baptized and received into Holy Orthodoxy at St. Athanasius in 2013. He married his wife, Khouria Christina, in 2024.
May God grant the newly ordained Priest Matthew and Kh. Christina many years!
Photos by Rand Markopoulos and Trevor David, courtesy of Antiochian.org.
Information for this article was obtained from Antiochian.org and St. Athanasius Church.
