The Minneapolis Parish

St. Mary’s Greek Catholic parish in Minneapolis — the newly organized Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant community that St. Alexis Toth was sent from Prešov to pastor — and his arrival in November 1889 into a situation already fraught with the tensions between an Eastern-rite congregation and a Latin American diocese.

Tradition: Carpatho-Rusyn / American Orthodox

A New Rusyn Parish in the Northwest

By the late 1880s the industrial and railroad economy of the upper Midwest had drawn a colony of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants to Minneapolis, and — as such colonies did everywhere — they organized a parish of their own rite. St. Mary’s Greek Catholic Church was the result: a Byzantine-rite, Church-Slavonic parish of Rusyn Greek Catholics, founded and owned in the immigrant manner by its lay congregation, which then sent to the Old World for a priest of its own kind (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, 1995, ch. 2; John H. Erickson, Orthodox Christians in America, 1999, ch. 2; D. Oliver Herbel, Turning to Tradition, 2014, ch. on Toth). The priest they received was Toth, appointed in 1889 and arriving that November (OCA, “Saint Alexis Toth and the Return to Orthodoxy of the Uniates in North America,” oca.org).

The diocesan life dates his arrival in the United States to 15 November 1889 and his first Divine Liturgy at St. Mary’s to Thanksgiving Day, 27 November 1889 (OCA, “Repose of Saint Alexis Toth”; the diocesan life). He came, as the previous section showed, as no ordinary immigrant chaplain but as a former seminary professor and eparchial chancellor — an unusually senior and learned man for a mining-and-railroad parish on the American frontier (see Marriage, Loss, and Prešov).

A Parish in an Impossible Position

St. Mary’s occupied precisely the unstable middle ground described in Section 01. It was a Catholic parish, in communion with Rome through the Unia; but it was Eastern in rite, Slavonic in language, led by a married-tradition (here widowed) priest, and lay-owned rather than vested in the diocesan bishop (Herbel, ch. on Toth; Erickson, ch. 2). Every one of these features put it at odds with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, whose ordinary, Archbishop John Ireland, was a leading figure of the Americanist party committed to assimilating immigrant Catholics into a single English-speaking, Latin-rite, celibate-clergy American Church (Marvin R. O’Connell, John Ireland and the American Catholic Church, 1988; Erickson, ch. 2).

The canonical custom of the day required an incoming priest to present himself and his credentials to the local Latin ordinary, since the Greek Catholics in America had as yet no bishop of their own — Rome would not appoint the first Greek Catholic bishop for America, Soter Ortynsky, until 1907 (Erickson, ch. 2; Magocsi, Our People, 2005, ch. 2; on Ortynsky and 1907, see The Carpatho-Rusyn Aftermath). This meant that a Rusyn priest’s ability to function depended on the recognition of a Latin archbishop who regarded his rite, his marriage discipline, and his very presence as problems. Toth walked into that dependency within weeks of arriving.

Toth as Pastor

Of Toth’s actual pastoral months at St. Mary’s the record is thin, and the reason is that the parish’s whole subsequent memory was reorganized around what happened next: the confrontation with Ireland and the turn to Orthodoxy. What the sources do convey is that Toth quickly grasped the impossibility of his position — a learned canonist would have understood at once what the refusal of faculties meant — and that he began, over the following year, the correspondence and reflection that would lead him and much of his flock out of the Roman communion (Herbel, ch. on Toth; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 2). The parish that received him in November 1889 as a Greek Catholic congregation would, sixteen months later, be received into the Orthodox Church with him (see St. Mary’s 1891).

It is worth marking here a point that the historiography section develops: St. Mary’s was not a passive object of Toth’s decision. It was a self-organized, property-owning lay community with its own grievances against the Latin hierarchy, and its movement into Orthodoxy was a corporate act in which the congregation’s own will was engaged, not merely its pastor’s (Herbel, ch. on Toth; Magocsi, Our People, ch. 2). The Orthodox reading honors Toth as the shepherd who led the return; the Rusyn-studies reading stresses the congregation’s own agency and grievances; the parish’s history supports both emphases and is flattened by neither (see The Two Readings).

The Later History of St. Mary’s

The parish Toth pastored did not vanish into the story of its founder. St. Mary’s, Minneapolis, received into Orthodoxy in 1891, became the seed and symbol of the whole movement — often called the “mother parish” of the Rusyn return — and continued as an Orthodox community, today within the Orthodox Church in America (OCA parish records, oca.org, as locator; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 2). Its cathedral would in time be named for its founding pastor once he was glorified. That a single frontier immigrant parish should become the origin-point of a church-wide movement is the measure of what its 1889–1891 crisis set loose; the next file examines the confrontation that precipitated it.

References

Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Alexis Toth and the Return to Orthodoxy of the Uniates in North America”; “Repose of Saint Alexis Toth.” oca.org — used as locators to the diocesan life and parish records.
Stokoe, Mark, and Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994. Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995.
Erickson, John H. Orthodox Christians in America: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Herbel, D. Oliver. Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. Our People: Carpatho-Rusyns and Their Descendants in North America. 4th rev. ed. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2005.
O’Connell, Marvin R. John Ireland and the American Catholic Church. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988.