The Rev. Gregory J. O’Keefe is the only Maine native in his parish, the only person of French and Irish descent, and the only one whose native language is English.

He’s definitely the only person at the Church of St. Cyril of Turov in New York who used to hang out at his parents’ grocery store in Orono.

And now O’Keefe, 55, is one of the few Americans to be elevated to a leadership post called “archimandrite,” or archabbot, in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, with about 2 million members.

Don’t be confused: He is a priest who serves as rector of St. Cyril of Turov, a church in the Richmond Hill section of Queens.

O’Keefe was elevated late last year. The title “archimandrite” is usually given to priestmonks in preparation for their eventual consecration as bishops. All bishops in the Orthodox churches must be named an archabbot before they can be consecrated as a bishop.

How a kid from Orono managed to make such an unorthodox pilgrimage is the story of a man who found the traditions and practices of Orthodoxy comparable to the Roman Catholicism of his childhood and youth.

“My family was very pious and devout,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “My mother said her prayers and my father read the Scriptures. But they didn’t talk about God. Yet, God was a close as any other member of the family. He was so real, I could almost reach out and touch him.”

He grew up a Roman Catholic in Orono. Adopted as an infant, he was the only child of the late Daniel and Virginia O’Keefe. His mother was a town librarian and his father owned a grocery store called Greg’s. He attended public schools and St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Main Street in Orono.

One night when he was 7 years and on his way to bed, O’Keefe said, he decided he would become a monk when he grew up.

Later, his parents were reluctant to pay tuition to the then-Catholic John Bapst High School in Bangor, but O’Keefe convinced them he wanted to attend a Catholic high school because he wanted to become a Franciscan monk. Franciscans take their cue from St. Francis of Assisi, living as clerics who minister to the poor.

He left Maine for St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore after graduating from John Bapst in 1965. He also did graduate work in the 1970s at Fordham and Princeton universities.

But changes in Roman Catholicism, especially with Vatican II in the 1960s, caught up with his order. He left the Roman Catholic Church for the Orthodox tradition in 1977 when he was 31. “It felt more like the church I was brought up in,” said O’Keefe, who remembers Latin Masses, meatless Fridays and the Baltimore Catechism of the days before Vatican II. “I found in Orthodoxy a stable, well-ordered life that felt uplifting and was similar to the way I was raised. It seemed more like I was returning to the church rather than leaving it.”

The Orthodox churches – there are several denominations – have roots in the earliest days of Christianity and were part of undivided Christendom until a split in A.D. 1054. Part of the division revolved around the role of the bishop of Rome – the pope.

Many of the Orthodox Christian churches are organized around national lines. O’Keefe is part of the largest Orthodox grouping in the United States, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, although his church was traditionally Byelorussian, an ethnic and language group now associated with the independent nation of Belarus in Eastern Europe.

O’Keefe said that he had expected to be ordained immediately after his conversion. Instead, the bishop sent him to work with the aging Russian Orthodox priest who had overseen his conversion.

He “absorbed Orthodoxy by just observing and living it. It’s kind of like a cold: You have to catch it from someone else,” said the archabbot, who was ordained an Orthodox priest three years after leaving the Roman Catholic Church.

During that time he learned not only the Orthodox liturgy but to conduct services in language understood by Russians, Lithuanians, Byelorussians and others.

The move from Western to Eastern Christianity changed more than O’Keefe’s religious affiliation; it also changed his lifestyle.

Orthodox priests, unlike Roman Catholic clerics, may choose to marry but may not become bishops or other leaders in the church. O’Keefe chose to continue his life of celibacy as a priestmonk rather than marry because it was what he was used to, he said. But he also had to find a way to support himself financially since he had no order like the Franciscans behind him.

In the early 1980s, he took a job in New York with a hospice program that provided services to AIDS patients. During that time he did supply preaching at Orthodox churches in Connecticut.

Today, he the director of HIV/AIDS Services for Hall Neighborhood House in Bridgeport, Conn., a program that works with single mothers who are HIV positive. He said that over the past 20 years, he has gone from helping people come to terms with death to helping them manage their disease.

He also is rector of St. Cyril’s. He has been the spiritual leader of the church in the Richmond Hills section of Queens in New York for more than 15 years.

O’Keefe said he travels the 130-mile round trip from his home in Milford, Conn., to Queens every Sunday and on feast days. The church pays him a stipend of $50 a week.

Under his leadership the congregation has grown – and changed.

When he began conducting services at St. Cyril’s, “14 old people showed up,” he said. “Now, the congregation is made up of young immigrant families.”

“Every Sunday between 125 and 150 souls come to church, and there are kids running everywhere. They all want to learn English. So I do much of the liturgy in English.”

O’Keefe said he was honored by being made an archimandrite, but that he is reluctant to become a bishop. Three times he has turned down offers to do so because he doesn’t want to have to answer for the entire diocese, even though it includes fewer than 20 parishes.

“It’s too awesome for me,” he said. “I have enough sins to answer for.”