A priest, formally a presbyter in Orthodox usage, is ordained by a bishop to celebrate the Divine Liturgy, administer the sacraments other than those, such as episcopal consecration and, in most Orthodox practice, ordination itself, reserved to bishops, and provide the day-to-day pastoral leadership of a parish community. The Orthodox ordination rite, like the Catholic one, understands priestly ordination as conferring a share, subordinate to and dependent upon a bishop's own fuller authority, in the one priesthood the episcopate holds in its fullness, a theology of ministry Orthodoxy and Catholicism largely share despite their eleventh-century institutional separation.
Parish priests in Orthodox practice typically wear a distinctive cylindrical clerical hat, the kamilavka in Slavic usage or a similar form elsewhere, awarded as an honor for service rather than worn automatically from ordination, one of several graded liturgical distinctions, alongside items such as the pectoral cross, that mark a priest's seniority and service record in a system considerably more visually graduated than most Western clerical dress.
Orthodox priests are addressed with the honorific Father in most jurisdictions and, unlike Roman Catholic priests, are permitted to have married before ordination, so that a typical parish priest lives with his wife and family within the community he serves, a visible difference from Western Catholic parish life that shapes Orthodox expectations of what pastoral presence in a community looks like.