Who is my "Spiritual Father"?

updated May 15, 2016

If you are a member of a parish, your spiritual father is your parish priest by default.  Only under special circumstances is your "spiritual father" someone other than your parish priest.

Your parish priest is responsible for your catechism, but he might delegate all or part of it to somebody else.  He will hear your pre-baptismal confession and your confessions after baptism.  He will bless you to receive Communion in another parish when you are traveling or out of town.

It is fine to refer to your parish priest as "my priest."   Actually, I really mostly only hear people in world orthodoxy using the term "spiritual father."  And it seems they often make more of it than they should, making him some kind of "elder" or something, or going "under obedience" to him, maybe with or maybe without his liking.

If your parish priest wants you to get a blessing for things like to buy a car or change jobs, then something is wrong...  beware.

It can be a very bad situation when a layman member of a parish has a "spiritual father" in a monastery.   An important reason to have married clergy in a parish is so they can shepherd non-monastics.  (Monk-confessors, for their own well-being, do not need to hear some of the stuff that married people need to confess...)  In world orthodoxy we see a tragedy and a horror with some laymen who visit the "Elder" Ephraim monasteries.