The Father of Rusyn Orthodoxy in America

 

The chief credit for the reunion with the Orthodox Church of a significant portion of the Carpatho-Rusyn and Galician emigrants in North America belongs to the “father of Rusyn America,” Protopresbyter Alexis Toth/Tovt (1854–1909), formerly a professor of canon law at the Greek-Catholic seminary in Prešov.

Alexis Toth was born on March 14, 1853, into the family of the Rusyn Greek-Catholic priest George, not far from the city of Prešov in northeastern Slovakia, which at that time was part of Austria-Hungary. His brother was also a priest, and his uncle was a bishop in Prešov. He received his theological education at the Roman Catholic seminary in the city of Esztergom and at the Uniate seminary in the city of Ungvár. He served as rector of a Uniate parish and held the post of director and professor of the seminary in Prešov. Having been widowed and being childless, he received an appointment to America, where he arrived in 1889 and began serving in the Rusyn parish in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the simple Rusyn people of Galicia and Transcarpathia, despite their formal Uniatism, continued to adhere to the “old faith,” as Orthodoxy was called there. In the parishes the Julian calendar and the Church Slavonic language in divine services were preserved, along with the ecclesiastical chants traditional for that region, the rites, and ancient iconography. The divine services helped them preserve their native spirit and resist Catholicization, Polonization, and Magyarization up to the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Austro-Hungarian state reduced the Rusyns to such poverty that, fleeing death by starvation, tens of thousands of Galicians and Carpatho-Rusyns streamed into North America, where they realized that they had been confused and deceived in their homeland. This is precisely why they returned en masse from Uniatism to the faith of their forefathers — to true Orthodoxy. In all, during the period from 1891 until the First World War, about 120 Uniate Carpatho-Rusyn parishes, numbering around 90,000 faithful, were reunited with the Russian Orthodox Church in America.

And this return to the native Orthodox Church began in 1891, when Father Alexis Toth, together with his parish, was reunited with Orthodoxy. At that time, misunderstandings began between him and the Roman Catholic bishop of the local diocese, to whom he was supposed to be subject. This bishop was a supporter of Americanization and of the unification of the rite of the Catholic Church in America, and he also had a negative attitude toward married clergy, non-Latin worship, and Uniatism as such. Father Alexis came to the conclusion that the only way out of the conflict was a return to the bosom of the Orthodox Russian Church.

“When I saw and heard all this, then I resolved upon what had long been living in my heart, and because of which my soul had been aching… to be Orthodox… but how?… It was necessary to be very cautious. That unfortunate union — the beginning of decline and of every evil — had taken deep root among our people; 250 years had passed since this yoke was laid upon our necks!… I fervently prayed to God that He would give me help and strength to enlighten my darkened faithful… In this matter the parishioners themselves helped me. When I summoned my parishioners, explained to them my sorrowful situation, and declared that nothing remained but to leave them, some of them said: ‘No, let us go to the Russian bishop; we cannot forever bow down to strangers!’” [1]

In 1891, the first 365 Carpatho-Rusyns followed him.

In San Francisco, where since 1872 the center of the only diocese of the Orthodox Russian Church in America at that time had been located, the first meeting of Father Alexis Toth with Vladimir Sokolovsky-Avtonomov, Bishop of the Aleutians and Alaska from December 12, 1887, to June 8, 1891, and a native of the Poltava region, took place in February 1891. A month later the Russian hierarch arrived in Minneapolis and, on March 25, 1891, received the rector, together with his entire parish, into the Orthodox Church. On July 14, 1892, the Holy Synod of the Russian Church officially confirmed the reception of Father Alexis and his parishioners into the Aleutian and Alaskan Diocese. Bishop Vladimir appointed him dean and also entrusted him with the parish in Chicago. Father Alexis’s parish became the first Orthodox parish in the entire area between San Francisco and New York.

In the early period, Protopresbyter Alexis and his parishioners had to face open religious and national hostility. He was accused of selling his faith and his Rusyn birthright to the “Muscovites” for money. However, for a year and a half he received no salary at all from the Synod in Russia, and in order to support himself he was forced to work in a bakery. The conversion of Father Alexis Toth’s parish to Orthodoxy served as an example for many Uniate communities in the United States and Canada.

Father Alexis knew Hungarian, Carpatho-Rusyn, Russian, German, and Latin. Father Alexis’s best-known book was Where to Seek the Truth?, which was reprinted several times in several languages, serving as an Orthodox catechism for former Uniates. For his labors in the field of establishing Orthodoxy in America, Father Alexis was awarded the mitre by the Synod of the Orthodox Russian Church, and from Emperor Nicholas II he was honored with the Orders of St. Vladimir, 4th and 3rd Class, and of St. Anna, 3rd and 2nd Class. In 1907, St. Tikhon Bellavin proposed that he become a vicar bishop of the diocese of the Russian Orthodox Greek-Catholic Church in America for the Rusyns, but he declined, citing his advanced age. In 1909, shortly before his repose, Father Alexis was elevated to the rank of protopresbyter.

Father Alexis Toth reposed on May 7, New Style, April 24, Old Style, 1909. In 1916, seven years after the repose of Father Alexis Toth, his body was reinterred in a special crypt behind the altar wall of the main church of St. Tikhon’s Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. At that time, it was found to be incorrupt. In 1994, Father Alexis’s coffin was opened once more, and again his body was found incorrupt. On May 29, 1994, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Orthodoxy in America, he was glorified among the saints by the Orthodox Church in America, his feast day being May 7, as the “Father of American Orthodoxy” and “Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in North America.”

The canonization of Protopresbyter Alexis took place on May 29–30, 1994, at St. Tikhon’s Monastery, where his holy relics rest in a reliquary by the iconostasis inside the monastery church. A particle of the relics of righteous Alexis is located in the Orthodox Church of the Holy Great-Martyr George in Lviv. Father Alexis is venerated not only in Transcarpathia, but also in the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia.

This holy Enlightener of the Uniates bears witness that the return of the Rusyns to Orthodoxy, including in Galicia, before 1946 was voluntary, and that the Russian Orthodox Church was reborn in Western Rus’, where it had been native since the time of the holy Prince Vladimir, not “with the help of Stalinist-Soviet tanks,” but as the result of God’s Providence and of the conscious striving of many Galicians toward Orthodoxy. [2] At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Orthodoxy reached Galicia not only across the border with Russia, but also to a considerable extent across the ocean — through emigrants returning from America. At [Uniate Metropolitan Andrey] Sheptytsky’s demand, the Uniate priests took an oath from emigrants before their departure for work, that they would not convert to Orthodoxy in America. Despite this, the settlers returned en masse to the faith of their forefathers, and upon arriving in New York their first act was to come to an Orthodox church and demand from the Orthodox priest release from the oath previously given under compulsion. [3]

According to the recollections of Archbishop Vitaly Maximenkov of Eastern America and New Jersey (1873–1960), who arrived in New York in October 1934 from Carpathian Rus’, his “American Orthodox flock consisted 80% of Carpatho-Rusyns and Galicians.” [4] In the 1930s, in the Carpathian region, for example in Maramureș, which after the First World War was incorporated into Czechoslovakia, conversions from Uniatism to Orthodoxy took on a mass character. In Galicia, the Polish authorities placed various obstacles in the way of reunion with the Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, in Lemkovyna and Galicia, from 1923 to 1929, the number of those who returned to Orthodoxy was about 30,000 people, and by 1933 this figure had increased to 60,000 people.

 

1. Memoirs of Father A. Toth. From the book by Protopresbyter Peter Kohanik, The Beginning of the History of American Rus’. [Connecticut: Petr Gardy Publishing, 1970], p. 488.

2. Frolov, Kirill Aleksandrovich. Carpatho-Russian Moscophilism — a “Blank Spot” in National History and Culture. // Institute of CIS Countries. Institute of Diaspora and Integration. Information-Analytical Bulletin. No. 6 (May 19, 2000). http://www.zatulin.ru/institute/sbornik/006/01.shtml

3. An Independent Church. http://do.znate.ru/docs/index-3124.html?page=7

4. Frolov, K. Saint Alexis Toth — Spiritual Leader of the American Carpatho-Rusyns // http://www.pravoslavie.ru/put/sv/svalexiytovt.htm; Protopresbyter Gabriel Kostelnik and the Lviv Council of 1946 // The Union in the Twentieth Century. http://unia-vs.narod.ru/material/kost.htm; Sulyak, S. G. The Rusyns in History: Past and Present (II) — http://odnarodyna.com.ua/content/rusiny-v-istorii-proshloe-i-nastoyashchee-ii; Mironov, Gregory. A Divided People. Rusyn American Rus’. Part 1. http://ruskline.ru/analitika/2014/09/12/razdelennyj_narod/ Part 2. http://ruskline.ru/analitika/2014/10/14/razdelennyj_narod/

 

Russian source: https://www.orthodox-canada.com/ru/russkiy-otets-pravoslaviya-v-amerike/