Saint Alexis Toth Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in America

Alexis Georgievich Toth was a Carpatho-Russian priest whose return to the Orthodox Church set in motion one of the largest movements of Eastern-rite Catholics into Orthodoxy in North America. Born in 1853 in the Austrian Empire among the Rusyn people of the Carpathian region, he came to the United States in 1889 as a Greek Catholic (Uniate) pastor and, after being refused by the local Latin hierarchy, led his Minneapolis parish and ultimately many thousands of his countrymen back to the Orthodox faith of their ancestors. He is commemorated on May 7, the day of his repose, and is also known as Saint Alexis of Wilkes-Barre.

Toth was born on March 14, 1853, in the village of Kobylnice near Presov (Eperjes), in what is today eastern Slovakia. He studied at a Latin Catholic seminary, a Greek Catholic seminary, and theology at the university in Prague. He married in 1878 and was ordained a Greek Catholic priest the same year, but his wife and child died soon after, leaving him a widower. Before his emigration he served in parishes and held positions as a diocesan chancellor and as a teacher and administrator at the Greek Catholic seminary in Presov.

Sent to minister to Rusyn immigrants, Toth arrived in the United States on November 15, 1889, and within weeks was serving St. Mary's Greek Catholic parish in Minneapolis. When he presented himself to Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul and Minneapolis, he was rejected: Ireland did not regard Toth or his Eastern bishop as truly Catholic and forbade him to function as a priest in the city. This rebuff, together with longstanding tension over the standing of Eastern-rite Catholics in America, led Toth and his parish to seek union with the Russian Orthodox Church. He was received into Orthodoxy through the ministry of Bishop Vladimir (Sokolovsky), and over the following years he became the foremost gatherer of Slavic immigrants into the Orthodox Church, by tradition bringing more than twenty thousand Carpatho-Russian and Galician Uniates into Orthodoxy.

Toth was elevated to the rank of protopresbyter and continued his missionary labors among immigrant communities, including service at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago and in the coal-mining parishes of Pennsylvania. He reposed on May 7, 1909, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and was buried at St. Tikhon's Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. He was glorified as a saint by the Orthodox Church in America on May 29, 1994, and is venerated as a confessor and defender of Orthodoxy in America.