Bishop Vladimir and the Decision

The year between rejection and reception: how St. Alexis Toth, cut off by Archbishop Ireland, came to see the Unia itself as the problem and Orthodoxy as the home of his people — and how contact with Bishop Vladimir (Sokolovsky) of the Russian Orthodox mission opened the door through which he and his parish would walk.

Tradition: Carpatho-Rusyn / American Orthodox

From Grievance to Conviction

The Ireland confrontation of December 1889 left Toth without faculties and his parish without recognition, but it did not by itself make him Orthodox. What the sources describe over the following year is a deliberation — a learned canonist working out the implications of his own predicament. Toth reasoned, in the account that comes down through his writings and the diocesan lives, that the American humiliation was not an accident of one archbishop’s temper but a revelation of what the Unia had always been: a subjection of an Eastern, once-Orthodox people to a Roman hierarchy that neither understood nor honored their rite and their priesthood (OCA, “Saint Alexis Toth and the Return to Orthodoxy of the Uniates,” oca.org; D. Oliver Herbel, Turning to Tradition, 2014, ch. on Toth). If the guarantees of Brest and Uzhhorod could be swept aside the moment the Rusyns crossed the ocean, then the security they thought the Union gave them was illusory, and the Church of their ancestors — Orthodoxy — was where they belonged (see His Arguments).

Herbel underscores that this was not merely wounded pride reclothed as theology. “It would not do justice to the theological aspects of his conversion,” he writes, “to claim Toth became Orthodox simply because he was a Russophile”; Toth’s move was a genuine act of theological conviction, even as it was also shaped by ethnic recovery and by the American context that made it possible (Herbel, Turning to Tradition, ch. on Toth). The Orthodox reading receives this as the awakening of a man to the truth of his own tradition; the Rusyn-studies reading sets it within a broader ethnic and jurisdictional revolt; the collection weighs the two in Section 07 and here simply records that Toth himself understood it as a return to the true Church (see The Two Readings).

Toth also knew he was not entirely alone or unprecedented. He was, as Herbel notes, “not the first Carpatho-Rusyn in the West to consider Orthodoxy” — the idea of return was in the air among the immigrant clergy and laity who chafed under the Latin hierarchy (Herbel, ch. on Toth). But it was Toth who acted decisively, at the head of a whole parish, and whose action became the model.

Finding the Russian Mission

Conviction required a door, and the door was the small Russian Orthodox diocese then present in the United States. Its bishop for the Aleutians and North America, resident on the West Coast, was Vladimir (Sokolovsky-Avtonomov), who governed the see with its chancery in San Francisco (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, 1995, ch. 2; Erickson, Orthodox Christians in America, 1999, ch. 2; on the see’s location, see The Immigrant Era). Learning that an Orthodox bishop was within reach — through the Russian consulate and the network of the immigrant colonies — Toth entered into contact with Bishop Vladimir and opened the question of receiving himself and his flock into the Orthodox Church (OCA, “Saint Alexis Toth and the Return to Orthodoxy of the Uniates”; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 2).

The mission Vladimir governed was modest — a scattering of parishes, funded from Russia, its energies still largely turned toward Alaska and the West Coast — and it had not gone looking for the Rusyns of the industrial East. That a Greek Catholic priest should approach it, offering to bring a whole parish, was the beginning of a reorientation that would, within a generation, make the returned Uniates the demographic center of gravity of American Orthodoxy (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 2; see The Movement). Bishop Vladimir’s role is thus pivotal but circumscribed: he was the hierarch who received Toth and set the precedent, though the sustained work of building the movement would fall to Toth himself and to Vladimir’s successors, above all Bishop Nicholas and later St. Tikhon (see St. Tikhon of Moscow).

The Weight of the Decision

It is easy, from a century’s distance, to underrate what the decision cost. Toth was proposing to lead a congregation out of the Roman Catholic Church — with all the social rupture that entailed in an immigrant world where the parish was the center of communal life — and into a small, foreign-funded mission church with no established place among the Rusyns. He was inviting the hostility not only of the Latin hierarchy but of the Greek Catholic authorities, who would regard the move as apostasy and would contest it congregation by congregation, building by building, in the years to come (see Opposition and the Lawsuits). That he and his parish went forward anyway is what the Church, in glorifying him, would honor as confession — the willingness to suffer loss for the truth of the faith (see The OCA Glorification).

Reported without polemic, the Greek Catholic view of the same decision is its mirror image: from within that communion, Toth’s turn was not a return but a defection — the abandonment of a legitimate Eastern Catholic Church, under the strain of American mistreatment, for the Orthodox jurisdiction (Fr. Peter Galadza and other Eastern Catholic scholars representing this reading; see The Two Readings). The collection confesses the Orthodox judgment — that this was a homecoming to the Church of the Rusyns’ ancestors — while reporting the Greek Catholic judgment accurately and treating the persons on both sides with dignity (METHODOLOGY §4.1). The next file turns to the act itself.

See Also

References

  • Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Alexis Toth and the Return to Orthodoxy of the Uniates in North America.” oca.org — used as locator to the diocesan life.
  • 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.