Opposition and the Lawsuits

The resistance the movement met: the hostility of the Greek Catholic and Latin authorities who regarded the returns as apostasy, the bitter divisions within congregations over which faction was the true parish, and the civil litigation over church property — including the Pennsylvania cases whose surviving records both illuminate and, in part, corroborate St. Alexis Toth’s account.

Tradition: Carpatho-Rusyn / American Orthodox

A Contested Movement

The parish-by-parish return described in the previous file was fought at every step. From the Greek Catholic side, the movement was apostasy — the loss of the faithful to a schismatic Church — and its authorities resisted it congregation by congregation, deploying priests, appeals to loyalty, and, where the buildings were at stake, lawyers (D. Oliver Herbel, Turning to Tradition, 2014, ch. on Toth; John H. Erickson, Orthodox Christians in America, 1999, ch. 2). From the Latin side, the Americanist hierarchy that had helped provoke the exodus now watched its results with alarm, and eventually with a change of policy: the appointment of a Greek Catholic bishop for America in 1907 was in part an attempt to stanch the losses Toth had opened (Magocsi, Our People, 2005, ch. 2; see The Carpatho-Rusyn Aftermath).

Reported without polemic (METHODOLOGY §4.1), the opposition was not mere obstruction; it expressed a genuine ecclesial conviction on the other side — that these were Catholic faithful being led out of their Church — just as the movement expressed the Orthodox conviction that they were being led home. The bitterness of the parish-level conflicts followed from the fact that both sides believed they were defending the true parish and its people.

The War Within the Congregation

Because the immigrant parish was a lay-founded, lay-owned institution, the decision to return split many congregations down the middle. A resolution to become Orthodox was rarely unanimous; some families and factions wished to remain Greek Catholic, and the result was two rival groups within a single community, each claiming to be the parish — and therefore to own its church building, cemetery, and endowment (Herbel, ch. on Toth; Erickson, ch. 2). These were not abstract disputes: the church was the center of immigrant social life, built with the pennies of laborers, and its possession was fiercely contested.

The Rusyn pattern of lay trusteeship — parish property held by an elected board of the congregation rather than vested in a bishop — sharpened the conflict and pushed it into the civil courts, which alone could adjudicate the ownership of incorporated property when a congregation divided (Herbel, ch. on Toth; on the trusteeship pattern, see The Rusyn Immigration). The Church of Russia’s financial support was, in part, a response to this reality: returned parishes that lost the building to the Greek Catholic faction in court had to be helped to rebuild (Encyclopedia.com, “Toth, Alexis,” on the Russian support).

The Property Litigation

The disputes reached the appellate courts, and here the historical record is unusually rich — and, for the source-critical reader, unusually useful. Herbel details the Wilkes-Barre-area litigation and its outcome. The courts, confronted with a novel kind of case, tended to rule against the Orthodox faction on the property, reasoning by analogy to Protestant precedent that a divided congregation’s property should follow “the group representing the tenets of the original, founding members” — that is, the group that had kept the parish’s founding (Greek Catholic) confession (Herbel, Turning to Tradition, ch. on Toth, quoting the reasoning; the Pennsylvania courts applying a “Lutheran” implied-trust precedent rather than a Roman hierarchical principle). By that logic the church building often stayed with those who remained Catholic, and the returning Orthodox had to build anew.

But the same litigation cut the other way on the history. Herbel observes that, even while ruling against Toth’s party on the property, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court “accepted as true” the general outline of the account Toth’s side presented — the mistreatment by the Latin hierarchy that had driven the Rusyns from Rome (Herbel, ch. on Toth). For the collection’s source-critical purposes this is significant: it means the shape of Toth’s narrative — the refusal of recognition, the alienation of the Rusyns — was found credible by a civil court weighing sworn testimony, an independent check on a story otherwise known largely from Toth himself (see The Ireland Encounter).

A Note on the Court Records

There is a further, sobering detail of provenance. Herbel notes that the transcripts of Toth’s court testimony were lost in the 1972 flood caused by Hurricane Agnes, which devastated the Wyoming Valley around Wilkes-Barre; what survives of the testimony is preserved chiefly through the appellate decision that quoted and summarized it (Herbel, Turning to Tradition, ch. on Toth). This is a characteristic instance of the repository’s recurring theme — that the documentary floor beneath even a well-attested modern saint can be partly washed away, quite literally, so that later record depends on what an intermediate source happened to preserve (cf. the destruction of St. Xenia’s burial registers in the 1824 flood, in the Xenia methodology file). The surviving court record corroborates the outline of Toth’s story; the fullest verbatim testimony behind it is gone.

The Cost, and the Confession

The opposition and the lawsuits were the price of the movement, and they are part of why the Church, in glorifying Toth, named him a confessor: he and his people suffered real loss — of buildings, of communal peace, of standing among their own — for the return (see The OCA Glorification). The collection confesses this from within the Church while insisting on the sober report the methodology requires: the losses were real on both sides, the courts’ property rulings were reasoned rather than merely hostile, and the persons who resisted the movement acted, by their own lights, in defense of their Church. The interpretive question of what the whole conflict was — a religious return, or a jurisdictional-cultural revolt over property, clergy, and ethnicity — is exactly the question the historiography section takes up next.

See Also

References

  • Herbel, D. Oliver. Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. (The property litigation; the “original, founding members” reasoning; the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s acceptance of Toth’s outline; the loss of the transcripts in the 1972 Hurricane Agnes flood.)
  • Erickson, John H. Orthodox Christians in America: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Magocsi, Paul Robert. Our People: Carpatho-Rusyns and Their Descendants in North America. 4th rev. ed. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2005.
  • “Toth, Alexis.” Encyclopedia.com — used as locator (Russian financial support for returned parishes).