OOD,
Thanks for your response. You could be right! 
Having said that, Bishop Tikhon responded to the email of elias. My question is, and I will reread it again. Bishop Tikhon doesn't address the change in Metropolitan Herman's title to Archbishop of Washington and New York. Anyway, feel free to comment!
Bishop Tikhon's response:
Dear Elias,
I'm sorry that your parish priest got his information from some source who misinformed him, probably not deliberately, about recent actions of The Holy Synod of The Orthodox Church in America.
Here is clarification of what was accomplished. I pointed out to my brother Hierarchs that the original tomos of autocephaly clearly designated our Church as "The Orthodox Church in America", not as "Orthodox Church in America". Archbishop Dmitri, too, recalled that soon after the autocephaly was effected, a stationery and letterhead printing job was sent to the printer's without the definite article. When this was discovered, 'someone in the office' at the time simply determined that it would be too expensive to have the printing jobs
done all over again, and since there was no adverse response at the time, the wrong practice had been continued. The Hierarchs all agreed that the definite article should be restored in all official documents of The Orthodox Church in America.
In the 1970s, when the Diocesan Council of the then Diocese of San
Francisco and the West was chaired by His Eminence, Metropolitan Vladimir (Nagossky) of blessed memory, a resolution was passed to request that the name of the ruling Bishop be changed to the Bishop of San Francisco and Los Angeles. This resolution was prepared and approved in view of His Eminence's plan, at that time, to move to Los Angeles eventually. However, the administration of His Eminence came to an end before that action could be concluded. Nevertheless, the Diocesan Council under his chairmanship, succeeded in changing the corporate name of the diocese to "The Diocese of the West." It remains so incorporated under California law until this day.
For several years, I have led discussions and mentioned in my annual
reports the great geographical size of our Diocese, larger than that of
many Local Churches! This is a feature, too, of the Canadian, Alaskan and Southern dioceses. From Helena, Montana, to San Diego ,California, in one direction and to Seattle ,Washington, and now to Kona, Hawaii, in other directions, as well as from Calhan, Colorado, to all those three destinations, is formidable when planning diocesan events, and expensive relative to episcopal visitations. I felt from the beginning that the diocese would increase in parishes and membership enough so that eventually it could be feasibly divided into as many as three dioceses by the Holy Synod. I have a good idea of how the lines of such dioceses would run. With a view to such a future, I explained that I thought the first division should be into two, and this might be feasible within the first part of this decade: 2005-2015. I explained that this change in title now would be a logical step in that process.
In an ensuing discussion, I did mention the amazing information I had
learned from clergy who had visited local parishes of the Antiochian
Archdiocese (headquartered in New Jersey); namely, that they had noticed pictures of a Hierarch, not me, in some offices and other places that identified that same Hierarch as, "The first Bishop of the West!" I've always considered myself to be at least the 10th Bishop of the West, or, counting the ROCOR and Serbian Hierarchs, the 25th or 26th Bishop of the West! However, any nomenclature in use by the Antiochian Archdiocese with whom we have enjoyed a long and friendly relationship (Metropolitan Antony (Bashir) of blessed memory, was, if anything even closer to us than today's Metropolitan Philip, who is a tireless worker for independence and powerful force for Evangelical works of charity and mission not only here in America, but abroad. Metropolitan Antony, like most of his own and preceding generations of Antiochian hierarchs in the homeland, was a great friend and admirer of the Russian Church and never forgot the Russian Church's unmercenary interest in helping the Antiochian Church recover its
independence from non-indigenous ecclesiastical powers. Antiochian clergy had never shunned the fine and fully Orthodox seminaries and academies of Russia in sending clerical candidates abroad for advanced study in favor of German or English theological seminaries and faculties of cacodox provenance, as had some other Local Churches under the Turks and afterwards. When the American State Department, with the Cold War's inception, refused to give visas to any Hierarchs with Soviet passports so that they could come here and exercise their episcopal authority over that group of parishes resisting unity with the North American Metropolitanate and constituting a separate "Exarchate" since the days of the Living Church, Archbishop Antony with the typical Antiochian selfless love towards the Russian Church, agreed to that Church's request that he would administer with full episcopal rights that same Exarchate. He was then designated a Metropolitan in the older sense, that is, the Hierarch of highest rank among Archbishops and Bishops, and awarded the White Klobuk, associated with that very high office, by the Patriarch of Moscow), is None of My Business and it is not for me to comment favorably or unfavorably relative to such, although I may certainly remark on facts without qualifying them either way.
My own reaction, besides amazement, was the coming to my mind of other and previous Bishops of the West, whether in The Orthodox Church in America or not, and the recollection of other Bishops with a title of Los Angeles.
While the Ecumenical Patriarchate, especially in the time of the
Patriarchate of ever-memorable Patriarch Athenagoras, was careful NOT to adopt the names of cathedras already occupied by Orthodox Hierarchs, nevertheless, the Patriarchate and the Archdiocese, certainly did have its ecclesiasticial districts with such titles; however, "ruling" or vicarial Bishops in those ecclesiastical or "diocesan" districts did exist, but they were always given the names of titular sees, many in Asia Minor. It has only been in these modern, perhaps more aggressive times of the present Ecumenical Patriarchate, perhaps feeling more insecure than in previous incumbencies, that care relative to designating cathedras with the names of existing cathedras has vanished entirely or at least been suppressed. So, there is now a Greek Metropolitan of San Francisco, where formerly there were Metropolitans or Bishops of titular sees, in the past. Bishop Demetrios, who was the incumbent at the time that Saint Sophia Cathedral in Los Angeles was built by Spiros Skouras, the great Hollywood producer and
ecclesiastical benefactor, chose Los Angeles as his residence, namely at
the fine one-storey house next to the Cathedral. However, circumstance resulted in his hasty move to San Francisco. However, for the purposes of my recollection, he was a Bishop who was a diocesan authority of sorts "of" Los Angeles. Also, after a series of controversies within the ROCOR Diocese of the West and San Francisco (of that time, that is) Saint John was designated Bishop of San Francisco, and ever-memorable Bishop Antony (Sinkiewicz) was moved to Los Angeles and a diocese "of Los Angeles " and, I believe, "and Dallas," was created for him. When Archbishop Antony reposed, the Diocese and title "of Los Angeles" reposed with him, and the parishes, with one or two
exceptions, that were at the time under his Omophorion passed under the Omophorion of His Eminence, Archbishop Kyril of Western U.S. and San Francisco, who soon had his title changed to "San Francisco and Western U.S.", I understand. As most anyone knows, I have chosen to keep living in Los Angeles since I was made a Bishop. While I certainly always felt I had the right to and option to adopt the title of Los Angeles, I avoided that step as perhaps an act of gratuitous
unfriendliness as long as Archbishop Antony was among the living.
A well-known logical fallacy is "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc." Freely
translated, it would say, "Since this happened after the fact, it must have been caused by the fact." I feel that whoever first opined that the recent nomenclature corrections and/or changes made recently by The Holy Synod were caused by anything at all occurring in the Antiochian Church or its North American Diocese with headquarters in New Jersey, had fallen under the spell of that fallacy.
Commending all to Christ's love,
+Tikhon, The Bishop of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the West, The
Orthodox Church in America
. With the new change, the Diocese of New York & New Jersey has merged with the Diocese of Washington, to become the Diocese of Washington and New York.