His Arguments

The substance of St. Alexis Toth’s apologetic case for the Rusyn return: his questions about papal infallibility and the meaning of “schism,” his account of what the Unia was and cost, and his appeal to the ancestral Orthodoxy of the Rusyns. The case is presented under the collection’s confessional-but-non-polemical discipline — Orthodox teaching confessed as the Church’s, the Roman position reported accurately, Toth’s polemical edge described rather than reproduced.

Tradition: Carpatho-Rusyn / American Orthodox

The Shape of the Case

Toth’s argument, distilled from Where to Seek the Truth? and his sermons and articles, had three moving parts: a historical claim (the Rusyns were originally Orthodox, and the Unia was a later imposition); a doctrinal claim (the papal doctrines that the Union required — above all universal jurisdiction and infallibility — are innovations the ancient Church did not teach); and a practical claim (the Union had failed even on its own terms, since the guarantees of the Eastern rite and married priesthood were being trampled in America). The three converged on a single conclusion: that the honest and faithful course for a Rusyn was to return to the Orthodox Church of his ancestors (Archimandrite Luke (Murianka), “St. Alexis, a Resolute Zealot for Orthodoxy,” orthochristian.com/86813.html; D. Oliver Herbel, Turning to Tradition, 2014, ch. on Toth).

Herbel is insistent that this was a theological case and not merely ethnic resentment dressed as doctrine: “It would not do justice to the theological aspects of his conversion… to claim Toth became Orthodox simply because he was a Russophile” (Herbel, Turning to Tradition, ch. on Toth). Toth argued, and evidently believed, that Orthodoxy was true and the papal claims false — and it is this conviction, not the grievance alone, that the Church honored in glorifying him.

The Doctrinal Questions

The doctrinal core of Toth’s case addressed the very points on which the Orthodox Church and the papacy divide, and here the collection states its standpoint plainly (METHODOLOGY §4.1). Toth’s catechism asked: “Can we call the pope Christ’s successor? Did Christ, the Apostles, the Holy Fathers, or the Holy Councils teach or write anything about infallibility?” (Archimandrite Luke (Murianka), orthochristian.com/86813.html). His answer — that the papal supremacy and infallibility confessed at the First Vatican Council (1870) are not the faith of the undivided Church — is the teaching of the Orthodox Church, which examined these claims across the second millennium and did not receive them (see Orthodoxy vs. Catholicism).

This is confessed here as the Church’s judgment, not adjudicated as a both-sides question, because it is not one (METHODOLOGY §4.1–4.2): the papal dogmas are, in Orthodox ecclesiology, doctrines the Church has weighed and declined. What the collection owes the Roman Catholic position is accurate report in its own terms, and that is owed and given: the Catholic Church confesses the Petrine primacy and, since 1870, the pope’s infallibility when defining doctrine ex cathedra as a gift for the Church’s unity and the preservation of the apostolic faith — a doctrine its defenders ground in Scripture and the Fathers and understand as the development, not the corruption, of the ancient primacy (this is the Catholic self-understanding, reported without endorsement). Accuracy toward that account is not neutrality between it and the Orthodox confession; Toth argued for the latter, and the collection stands with him while representing his interlocutor fairly.

The word “schism” carried a particular charge in Toth’s polemic, and it is worth noting how the collection handles his edge here. Toth pressed the Rusyns to ask what “schism” and “heretic” actually meant, turning the Latin charge that the Orthodox were “schismatics” back on the Union that had, in his telling, cut his people off from their own Church (Archimandrite Luke (Murianka), orthochristian.com/86813.html). His rhetoric could be sharp — he was a controversialist writing to win a movement, and his pamphlets did not spare the papacy or the Unia. The collection describes that polemical force without reproducing it: the point of doctrine is confessed soberly; Toth’s nineteenth-century combativeness is reported as a feature of his writing, not adopted as the register of this account (METHODOLOGY §4.1, on the sober rather than triumphal statement of the standpoint).

The Historical and Practical Claims

Toth’s historical claim — that the Rusyns were originally Orthodox and the Unia a later, imposed settlement — is well founded and is developed in Section 01: the unions of Brest (1596) and Uzhhorod (1646) did indeed bring a previously Orthodox people into the Roman communion, on guarantees of Eastern integrity (see Brest, Uzhhorod, and the Greek Catholics). This is the ground of the whole “return” language: for Toth, becoming Orthodox was not adopting a new faith but recovering the old one (Herbel, Turning to Tradition, ch. on Toth, on the “return to tradition” framing). The Greek Catholic reply — that the unions were a genuine reconciliation and that the Eastern Catholic Church is itself a legitimate bearer of the Byzantine tradition, not a mere waystation back to Orthodoxy — is a real counter-claim, reported here and weighed in the historiography section (see The Two Readings).

Toth’s practical claim was the one his audience felt in their own lives: that the Union’s guarantees were worthless where it counted. In America the married Eastern priest was rejected, the Slavonic rite despised, the Rusyn parish pressured to Latinize — the very experience that had begun with the Ireland confrontation (see The Ireland Encounter). If Rome would not honor the terms of the Union in America, Toth argued, then the Union protected nothing, and the security it promised was a fiction. This practical argument, joined to the historical and doctrinal ones, is what made the case persuasive to people who might have been unmoved by dogmatics alone.

The Argument and the Man

Toth’s arguments cannot be neatly separated from his person and his losses, and the collection does not try. He argued as a former insider — a canonist who had taught the Union’s own law and now turned it against the Union — and as a man who had been personally humiliated and bereaved. His opponents then and some scholars since have read the theology as the rationalization of the grievance; Herbel and the Orthodox tradition read the grievance as the occasion that freed a genuine theological conviction to act (Herbel, ch. on Toth; see The Two Readings). The collection confesses the second reading while acknowledging the first as a real interpretive position — and notes that the Church, in naming Toth a confessor and defender of Orthodoxy, ratified the judgment that his was, at bottom, a witness to the truth of the faith and not merely the manifesto of an aggrieved ethnic leader (see The OCA Glorification).

See Also

References

  • Archimandrite Luke (Murianka). “St. Alexis, a Resolute Zealot for Orthodoxy.” orthochristian.com/86813.html (pravoslavie.ru/86813.html) — for the catechism’s questions on the pope, infallibility, “schism,” and the Unia, and for Toth’s plain style.
  • Herbel, D. Oliver. Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. (The theological seriousness of Toth’s conversion; the “return to tradition” framing.)
  • Toth, Alexis G. Where to Seek the Truth? and collected Selected Letters, Articles, Papers & Sermons.
  • Orthodoxy vs. Catholicism — this repository, orthodoxy/09-orthodox-distinctives/orthodox-vs-catholic.md, for the systematic treatment of papal primacy and infallibility.