The Rusyn Immigration

The mass emigration of Carpatho-Rusyn and Galician Greek Catholics from Austria-Hungary to the coal, coke, and mill towns of Pennsylvania and the upper Midwest between the 1880s and 1914 — and why an Eastern-rite people with married priests and Slavonic services became, in the eyes of the Latin American hierarchy, a problem to be assimilated. This is the demographic engine of St. Alexis Toth’s movement.

Tradition: Carpatho-Rusyn / American Orthodox

Why They Left

The Rusyn emigration was, first of all, an economic flight. The mountain villages of the Prešov, Mukachevo, and Lemko regions were poor, land-hungry, and — under the intensifying Magyarization policy of the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy after 1867 — culturally pressed: Rusyn schools were closed or Hungarianized, the Rusyn language and Cyrillic script discouraged, and even the Greek Catholic Church subjected to campaigns to introduce Hungarian and the Gregorian calendar (Paul Robert Magocsi, Our People: Carpatho-Rusyns and Their Descendants in North America, 4th ed., 2005, chs. 1–2; Magocsi and Pop, Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture, s.v. “Magyarization,” “Emigration”). From the early 1880s, and in swelling numbers through the 1890s and 1900s until the First World War closed the ports, Rusyns crossed to the United States — perhaps several hundred thousand by 1914 — settling above all in the anthracite fields and steel towns of northeastern and western Pennsylvania (Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Mahanoy City, Johnstown, Pittsburgh), and in industrial pockets of the Midwest such as Minneapolis (Magocsi, Our People, ch. 2; John H. Erickson, Orthodox Christians in America, Oxford, 1999, ch. 2).

They came as Greek Catholics. They built churches in the Byzantine rite, sent home for married priests trained at Uzhhorod and Prešov, and reconstituted in Pennsylvania the parish life of the Carpathians — Slavonic liturgy, iconostasis, the old calendar, the cantor (d’iak), and the lay brotherhood (Magocsi, Our People, ch. 2; D. Oliver Herbel, Turning to Tradition, Oxford, 2014, ch. on Toth). It was St. Mary’s Greek Catholic parish in Minneapolis, one such community, that Toth was sent to serve in 1889.

The Collision with the Latin Hierarchy

The immigrants entered a Roman Catholic Church in America that was neither prepared for them nor inclined to accommodate them. Three features of that Church made friction almost inevitable, and they should be stated as historical facts rather than as accusations (METHODOLOGY §4.1).

First, the married clergy. The Latin Church in America was governed by the discipline of clerical celibacy, and its bishops — many of them, like Archbishop John Ireland, formed in an Irish tradition that took celibacy as a mark of the priesthood itself — regarded a married Eastern priest as an anomaly and a potential scandal to Latin faithful (Erickson, ch. 2; Herbel, ch. on Toth). Even a widowed priest such as Toth, canonically eligible in every Eastern reckoning, could be refused on the principle that a once-married man ought not to be functioning as a priest in the American Church.

Second, Americanism and assimilation. Ireland belonged to the “Americanist” party of the hierarchy, which held that the immigrant Church should assimilate rapidly into an English-speaking, single-rite American Catholicism; ethnic and Eastern-rite particularism was, on this view, an obstacle to be overcome (Erickson, ch. 2; Herbel, ch. on Toth; on Ireland’s Americanism, Marvin R. O’Connell, John Ireland and the American Catholic Church, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988). The Greek Catholics — foreign in language, Eastern in rite, and led by married priests — were exactly the sort of unassimilated enclave the Americanists wished to dissolve.

Third, jurisdiction and property. The Rusyn parishes were typically founded and owned by lay trustees — the immigrant congregation that had raised the money — a pattern at odds with the American Roman practice of vesting parish property in the diocesan bishop (Herbel, ch. on Toth; Erickson, ch. 2). When a parish’s loyalty was contested, so was its building; the resulting disputes would end in the civil courts (see Opposition and the Lawsuits).

An Unstable Middle Position

The Rusyn immigrant thus occupied an unstable middle. To the Latin hierarchy he was a Catholic of an inconvenient kind, to be normalized. To the Orthodox — represented in America by the small but growing Russian diocese with its see moving from Alaska toward the Atlantic — he was a brother separated by a historical union, a candidate for return (Erickson, ch. 2; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, 1995, ch. 2; see The Immigrant Era). And in his own memory he was heir to an Orthodox past overlaid, only a few centuries before, by the unions of Brest and Uzhhorod. When the pressures of the Latin hierarchy made his Greek Catholic identity untenable in America, all three of these definitions were available to him — and the choice among them is what Toth’s movement forced into the open.

It is important, in stating this, to resist a flattening polemic in either direction. The Rusyns were not simply victims, nor the Latin bishops simply villains; the collision was between a genuine ecclesial discipline (Latin celibacy, applied by men who believed it a matter of principle) and a genuine ecclesial right (the Eastern married priesthood, guaranteed at the unions and defended by men who believed that a matter of principle). What made the collision historically consequential was that, in America and only in America, the Rusyns had a third door — the Orthodox Church of their ancestors — through which to walk when the Latin door was shut. Magocsi, writing from the Rusyn-studies vantage, stresses the socioeconomic and ethnic drivers; Herbel, writing as a church historian, stresses that the return was also and irreducibly a theological act; the historiography section weighs the two (see The Two Readings). Both agree on the demographic fact this file has described: a large, self-organizing, property-owning Eastern-rite immigrant population, poorly served by a hierarchy that wished it were something else.

See Also

References

  • Magocsi, Paul Robert. Our People: Carpatho-Rusyns and Their Descendants in North America. 4th rev. ed. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2005.
  • Magocsi, Paul Robert, and Ivan Pop, eds. Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture. Rev. ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
  • Erickson, John H. Orthodox Christians in America: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Stokoe, Mark, and Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994. Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995.
  • Herbel, D. Oliver. Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
  • O’Connell, Marvin R. John Ireland and the American Catholic Church. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988.