St. Alexis Toth of Wilkes-Barre

Who was St. Alexis Toth?

St. Alexis Toth was a priest of the Carpathian mountains who became a pastor of immigrants in America. Born in 1854 near Prešov, in what is now eastern Slovakia, he was a Greek Catholic, a Byzantine-rite priest of the Rusyn people in communion with Rome. In 1891, in Minneapolis, he and his parish entered the Russian Orthodox Church, and over the next eighteen years he brought thousands of his fellow immigrants with him. The Orthodox Church in America glorified him as a saint in 1994.

We tell his story as the Orthodox Church keeps it. It touches an old wound between Eastern Catholics and the Orthodox, and it deserves to be told gently.

A priest of Prešov

Alexis came from a family of priests: his father and brother were priests and his uncle a bishop. He was well educated and spoke Rusyn, Hungarian, Russian and German, with Latin and some Greek. He married Rosalie Mihalich, a priest's daughter, and was ordained in 1878. Within a few years his wife died, and then their only child. The Orthodox Church's life says he bore it "with the patience of Job."

He became secretary to the bishop of Prešov, directed an orphanage and taught church history and canon law at the seminary. In 1889 he was sent to America to serve the Rusyn parish of St. Mary in Minneapolis.

The clash in Minneapolis

There was no Eastern Catholic bishop in America then, so in late 1889 Father Toth presented himself to the Latin archbishop, John Ireland of St. Paul. Ireland wanted immigrant Catholics to blend into one English-speaking American Church, and, as the OCA's life puts it, ethnic parishes and non-Latin clergy did not fit that vision. By Father Toth's own account, the meeting went badly, and the archbishop refused to accept him and told his own parishes to have nothing to do with the Rusyn parish.

Father Toth wrote to his bishop in Europe and heard nothing that helped. The parishioners themselves proposed going to the Russian Orthodox bishop. On March 25, 1891, Bishop Vladimir of San Francisco and Alaska came to Minneapolis and received Father Toth and 361 parishioners into the Orthodox Church.

Many Rusyn Greek Catholics in America stayed in communion with Rome and built the Byzantine Catholic Church that is still here today. The two churches remember these years differently.

Missionary to the immigrants

The new Orthodox parish was very poor. For a long time Father Alexis received no salary and worked in a bakery to support himself, while still giving alms to clergy and families worse off than he was.

His bishops, among them the future patriarch St. Tikhon, sent him to preach wherever there were Slavic immigrants. He traveled widely and helped form or bring into Orthodoxy seventeen parishes. The OCA notes that he warned his people against intolerance and urged them to respect other believers. He wrote practical advice for immigrant families too, such as his article "How We Should Live in America," on education, sobriety and bringing children to church.

The Russian Church gave him a jeweled miter and the Tsar honored him with the Orders of St. Vladimir and St. Anna. In 1907 he was proposed as a bishop and declined, saying the office belonged to a younger, healthier man.

Death and glorification

His health failed in 1908. He died in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on May 7, 1909, and was buried at St. Tikhon's Monastery in South Canaan, where he had attended the consecration of the church in 1906. In 1916 his remains were moved to a mausoleum behind the monastery church. In 1994 the Orthodox Church in America glorified him as a saint, and his relics were brought into the church.

The OCA's life tells one story of his intercession (reported). In January 1993 a father who had lost touch with his son for twenty-eight years prayed to St. Alexis for news of him. The very next day the son, who had felt a sudden longing in church to find his father, telephoned him.

St. Mary's in Minneapolis today

The little parish he led into Orthodoxy is now St. Mary's Orthodox Cathedral in northeast Minneapolis. It counts Alexis as its first pastor, from 1889 to 1893, and has hosted lectures in his name. Its website also preserves pages of the parish register in his hand. For the Orthodox of America he is one of the fathers of their Church on this continent: the OCA's life calls the return of the Rusyn and Galician immigrants under his care "a major event in the history of the North American Mission."

Symbols of St. Alexis Toth in art

As a modern saint, Alexis is known from photographs and new icons. Icons show him as a gray-bearded priest in a red or gold phelonion with a pectoral cross, holding a Gospel book or scroll and blessing with his right hand. Some show the jeweled miter he received.

Feast day and troparion

The Orthodox Church in America keeps his feast on May 7. Its troparion calls him a heavenly intercessor and teacher and asks him to beg the Master to strengthen the Orthodox Faith in America and to grant the world peace; the OCA prints the full text on its website.

Let us remember before God this pastor of poor immigrants, and pray for the day when all of Christ's Eastern children, Catholic and Orthodox, share one table again.