The OCA Glorification

The glorification of St. Alexis Toth by the Orthodox Church in America on 29–30 May 1994 at St. Tikhon’s Monastery, South Canaan, Pennsylvania — the proclamation of the Holy Synod, the title “Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in America,” and the bicentennial context in which the OCA recognized its own missionary saints.

Tradition: Carpatho-Rusyn / American Orthodox

The Act

The Holy Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Church in America glorified Toth on 29–30 May 1994, at St. Tikhon’s Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania — the monastery St. Tikhon had founded in 1905 and the spiritual center of the church’s Pennsylvania heartland (OCA, “The Proclamation of the Holy Synod of Bishops on the Glorification of Saint Alexis Toth,” oca.org/fs/proclamation-glorification-saint-alexis-toth; OCA, “Repose of Saint Alexis Toth”). The glorification services took place over the Memorial Day pilgrimage weekend, the monastery’s principal annual gathering, so that the act was witnessed by a large assembly of clergy and faithful.

[Disputed: whether the glorification is dated to “29 May” or “29–30 May” 1994. The OCA proclamation and pilgrimage records give the two-day span 29–30 May 1994 for the glorification services at St. Tikhon’s; some summaries cite simply 29 May 1994 as the date of glorification (en.wikipedia.org, “Alexis Toth”; the OCA’s own “Repose” life). The difference reflects a single liturgical event spanning the eve and the day; the collection gives 29–30 May 1994 and notes the “29 May” shorthand.]

The date fell in 1994, the bicentennial year of Orthodoxy in North America — two centuries after the Valaam mission reached Kodiak in 1794 — and Toth’s glorification belongs to the cluster of American glorifications the OCA and other bodies performed around that anniversary (the same year saw the glorification of St. Jacob Netsvetov of Alaska, and the martyred American-mission priests Sts. John Kochurov and Alexander Hotovitzky were glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate later in 1994; see The Saints of North America). The bicentennial framing was deliberate: the OCA was recognizing the saints of its own soil at the moment it marked two hundred years of the mission.

The Proclamation and the Title

The Synod’s proclamation set out the grounds and the honors of the glorification in formal terms. It directed that Toth be numbered among the saints, that his commemoration be kept, and — in the language the sources preserve — “that his honorable remains be considered as holy relics,” to be enshrined at St. Tikhon’s (OCA, “The Proclamation of the Holy Synod of Bishops on the Glorification of Saint Alexis Toth,” oca.org). The proclamation names him in liturgical address as “Holy Father Alexis, Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in America” and, in the formal style, as “the Holy and Righteous Archpriest Alexis Toth” (OCA, “Proclamation”; the invocation “Holy Father Alexis, Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in America, Pray for us!”).

The title repays attention, because it states the Church’s own reading of who Toth was. He is glorified not as a martyr (he died in his bed, not by violence) nor as a monastic ascetic, but as a confessor — one who suffered for the faith and bore public witness to it — and specifically as a “Defender of Orthodoxy in America.” The honorific “Righteous Archpriest” (or protopresbyter) marks his rank and his priestly, non-monastic sanctity. This is the same reading the collection has confessed throughout: that the ground of the glorification is the character of Toth’s witness — the return he led at cost, the truth he defended in his writings and his person — and not, as the historiography section stressed, any particular resolution of the numbers or the causal debates (see The Numbers and the Agency Question).

What the Glorification Claims

Consistent with the repository’s methodology, the glorification should be understood for what it is and is not (METHODOLOGY §3.5; cf. the Xenia methodology on glorification as the reception of a holy life rather than the certification of a biography, in the Xenia methodology file). In glorifying Toth the OCA recognized and entered into its calendar a saint whose holiness the faithful already venerated; it did not thereby settle the disputed date of his birth, the exact totals of his converts, or the historiographical debate over the movement’s nature. Those remain, as the earlier sections have shown, questions for the historian, held to the evidential standard of §4.2. The glorification’s claim is narrower and greater: that Alexis Toth is a saint of the Church, a confessor whose intercession may be sought and whose life is offered to the faithful as an authentic expression of the Orthodox way.

The act also had a pointed ecclesial meaning for the church that performed it. The OCA — the heir of the very Russian missionary diocese that had received the Rusyns — was glorifying the man most responsible for the returned-Uniate component of its own body. To canonize Toth was, in part, for American Orthodoxy to recognize its own origins in the immigrant return, and to honor the Carpatho-Rusyn stream as constitutive of the American Church rather than incidental to it (see Father of Orthodoxy in America). The relics enshrined at St. Tikhon’s — the burial place near which so many of the returned parishes clustered — made the point in stone and cedar: the confessor of the Rusyn return lies at the heart of the American church he helped to build.

See Also

References

  • Orthodox Church in America. “The Proclamation of the Holy Synod of Bishops on the Glorification of Saint Alexis Toth.” oca.org/fs/proclamation-glorification-saint-alexis-toth. (The 29–30 May 1994 dates; St. Tikhon’s Monastery; the title “Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in America”; “the Holy and Righteous Archpriest Alexis Toth”; the relics.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Alexis Toth, Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in America.” oca.org — used as locator.
  • “Alexis Toth.” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org) — used as locator (the “29 May 1994” shorthand).
  • The Saints of North America — this repository, orthodoxy/10-orthodoxy-in-america/mission-and-converts/american-saints.md.