St. Mary’s, 25 March 1891

The reception of St. Alexis Toth and the parish of St. Mary’s, Minneapolis, into the Orthodox Church by Bishop Vladimir (Sokolovsky) on 25 March 1891 — the date, the numbers, the sequence of ratification, and why this single parish’s return became the seed of the largest movement of converts in American Orthodox history.

Tradition: Carpatho-Rusyn / American Orthodox

The Act

On 25 March 1891 — the feast of the Annunciation on the Julian calendar the parish kept — Bishop Vladimir (Sokolovsky) received St. Alexis Toth and 361 parishioners of St. Mary’s, Minneapolis, into the Orthodox Church (OCA, “Saint Alexis Toth and the Return to Orthodoxy of the Uniates,” oca.org; the reception of “Father Toth and 361 parishioners” on 25 March 1891 is the consistent figure of the OCA and diocesan lives; some accounts round to 360, e.g. Encyclopedia.com, “Toth, Alexis,” giving “360 of them”). The date is firmly and repeatedly attested and is the anchor around which the whole chronology of the movement is fixed; the number 361 is the standard figure, with “360” a rounding in some sources.

[Disputed: the precise number received on 25 March 1891 is given as 361 in the OCA and diocesan lives and as 360 in some reference works (Encyclopedia.com, “Toth, Alexis”). The difference is trivial and reflects rounding; the collection uses 361 as the standard figure while noting the variant.]

The reception was effected on the ground by Bishop Vladimir; its formal ratification by the Holy Synod of the Church of Russia followed, and some sources accordingly speak of the parish’s reception as completed in 1892, when the Russian Synod acted to accept the community into the diocese (Herbel, Turning to Tradition, 2014, ch. on Toth, referring to the 1892 dimension of the reception; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, 1995, ch. 2). This is the source of the occasional statement that Toth “converted in 1892”: the reception happened on 25 March 1891, and its synodal confirmation in the following year. The collection dates the event to 25 March 1891 and notes the 1892 ratification, rather than treating the two as rival dates for a single act.

Why This Parish Became a Seed

The reception of one immigrant parish in Minneapolis would be a footnote were it not for what it precipitated. Three features made St. Mary’s 1891 the origin-point of a movement.

First, it was corporate. Toth did not convert as an individual clergyman seeking a new jurisdiction; he brought a whole congregation, received together in a single act. This established the template for everything that followed — not scattered individual conversions but parish-by-parish returns, each an organized community bringing its people, its cantor, its building, and its resources (Herbel, ch. on Toth; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 2; see Wilkes-Barre and the Parishes).

Second, it was precedented and reproducible. Toth had shown the disaffected Greek Catholic clergy and laity of the industrial East a concrete path: an Orthodox bishop existed, would receive them, and would honor their Byzantine rite and their married clergy — everything the Latin hierarchy denied them. What one parish had done, others could do, and Toth would spend the next eighteen years showing them how (Herbel, ch. on Toth; OCA, “Saint Alexis Toth”).

Third, it was backed. Once the Church of Russia grasped the scale of the opportunity, it lent the mission financial and moral support — funds that helped struggling returned parishes survive the loss of their buildings and the hostility of their former communion (Encyclopedia.com, “Toth, Alexis,” noting the “financial and moral support from Russia”; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 2). The returned Uniates would, within two decades, become the numerical heart of the American diocese and a principal reason its see moved eastward to New York under St. Tikhon (see The Immigrant Era).

The Meaning of the Date, Confessed and Reported

Within the Orthodox Church, 25 March 1891 is remembered as the day a portion of a long-separated people came home — the Annunciation feast lending the return its own liturgical resonance of a new beginning (OCA, “Saint Alexis Toth”). This is the collection’s confession, stated soberly and without triumph (METHODOLOGY §4.1): the reception is read as a genuine return to the mother Church, and Toth’s leadership of it as the ground of his later glorification (see The OCA Glorification).

The same date is read differently from the Greek Catholic side, and that reading is owed accurate report: there, 25 March 1891 marks the first major secession of a Rusyn parish from the Eastern Catholic Church in America — the opening of a hemorrhage that the Greek Catholic authorities would resist for decades and that they attribute above all to the mistreatment of their people by the Latin hierarchy (Fr. Peter Galadza and other Eastern Catholic scholars; see The Two Readings). Both readings agree on the facts of the day; they differ on its meaning, and the collection sets the Orthodox confession beside the Greek Catholic account rather than pretending the day meant only one thing to everyone it touched.

What is not in dispute is the day’s consequence. From this reception flowed the transfer of Toth to Wilkes-Barre, the parish-by-parish movement of the 1890s and 1900s, and the demographic transformation of American Orthodoxy — the subject of the next section.

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 (the 25 March 1891 reception of Toth and 361 parishioners).
  • 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.
  • “Toth, Alexis.” Encyclopedia.com (drawing on the New Catholic Encyclopedia) — used as locator for the “360” figure and the Russian support.