Father of Orthodoxy in America

The devotional epithet “Father of Orthodoxy in America” weighed against the fuller history: what is true in it — the demographic transformation Toth led and his standing among the American saints — and what it overstates, since Orthodoxy in North America began in Alaska in 1794, not with the Rusyn return. A sober assessment of a real but bounded greatness.

Tradition: Carpatho-Rusyn / American Orthodox

The Epithet

St. Alexis Toth is widely called the “Father of Orthodoxy in America” (also “Father of American Orthodoxy”) — an honorific that circulates in the devotional literature and among the Carpatho-Rusyn American faithful (Canadian Orthodox History Project, “Saint Alexis Toth,” orthodoxcanada.ca, “considered by many to be ‘the Father of American Orthodoxy’”; Encyclopedia.com, “Toth, Alexis,” explaining the epithet by the fact that a large share of American Orthodox descend from his converts). The claim behind it is demographic and is substantially true: a very large fraction of the Orthodox Christians of the United States are the descendants of the returned Uniates whom Toth’s movement brought into the Church. As Encyclopedia.com puts the point, Toth “has been termed the Father of Orthodoxy in America because more than half of the [several hundred thousand] Russian Orthodox followers in the United States are descendants of his converts” (Encyclopedia.com, “Toth, Alexis”).

The epithet is, then, a genuine tribute to a genuine achievement: through the movement Toth led, American Orthodoxy was transformed from a small Russian-Alaskan mission into a mass immigrant Church with a broad parish base in the industrial East — the demographic foundation on which everything later was built (John H. Erickson, Orthodox Christians in America, 1999, chs. 2–3; see The Immigrant Era).

What the Epithet Overstates

Yet the title must be weighed, not merely repeated, and the sober historical record qualifies it in two ways.

First, chronology. Orthodoxy in North America did not begin with Toth. It began with the Russian mission to Alaska in 1794 — the eight monks of Valaam, St. Herman, St. Juvenaly — and grew through the nineteenth-century Alaskan and West Coast church of St. Innocent and St. Jacob Netsvetov, decades before the Rusyn return (see The Saints of North America; St. Herman of Alaska; St. Innocent of Alaska). If any figure is the “father” of Orthodoxy on the continent in the founding sense, it is Herman, its cornerstone saint, not Toth. Toth is the father of the immigrant, continental, mass American Orthodoxy of the twentieth century — a real and enormous thing, but not the origin of Orthodoxy in America as such. The precise, defensible claim is that he is the father of the Carpatho-Rusyn return and thereby of the demographic body of much of American Orthodoxy — not its first planter.

Second, agency, as the historiography section established. The epithet, taken flatly, credits one man with a movement that had powerful impersonal drivers and other agents — the Latin-hierarchy pressures, the Magyarizing push, the availability of the Russian mission, the many returning clergy and congregations besides Toth (Herbel, Turning to Tradition, 2014, ch. on Toth, noting Toth “was not the first Carpatho-Rusyn in the West to consider Orthodoxy”; see The Numbers and the Agency Question). Toth shaped the return that occurred; he did not single-handedly cause a phenomenon that social forces were already driving. The epithet honors his catalytic and organizing role, which was real and central, but it should not be read as erasing the forces and the fellow-laborers around him.

Toth Among the American Saints

Placed in the synaxis of North American saints, Toth occupies a distinct and legible position (see The Saints of North America). He is not of the Alaskan founding generation (Herman, Innocent, Juvenaly, Jacob), nor of the native Alaskan line (Peter the Aleut, Olga of Kwethluk). He belongs with the bishops and priests of the immigrant archdiocese — alongside his hierarch St. Tikhon of Moscow, the Syro-Arab St. Raphael of Brooklyn, the Serbian missionary St. Sebastian of Jackson, and the martyred American-mission priests Sts. John Kochurov and Alexander Hotovitzky — the cohort that built the multiethnic continental Church between the 1890s and 1917 (see St. Tikhon of Moscow; St. Raphael of Brooklyn; St. Sebastian of Jackson). Within that cohort Toth’s specific gift is the Carpatho-Rusyn return — the single largest demographic contribution any of them made to the American Church.

His type of sanctity is also distinct. He is a married (widowed) parish priest, glorified as a confessor — not a hierarch-missionary like Innocent, not a martyr like Kochurov, not a monastic. His holiness is the holiness of the faithful pastor who suffered loss for the truth and led his people home; it is a sanctity accessible to the parish clergy and the immigrant laity who venerate him, and this accessibility is part of why the cult is so rooted in the Pennsylvania and Midwestern parishes of his movement (see Relics and Feast).

A Sober Assessment

The honest verdict, then, honors the man without inflating the title. Toth was the catalyst and chief architect of the Carpatho-Rusyn return to Orthodoxy, and thereby a principal maker of the demographic American Orthodox Church of the twentieth century — an achievement large enough to warrant the veneration and the “Father of Orthodoxy in America” epithet as a devotional tribute, provided the epithet is read as the collection reads it: father of the immigrant return, not first planter of the faith; shaper of a movement, not sole cause of a tide. The Church glorified him for his confessor’s witness, and that witness stands whatever adjustments the historian makes to the epithet. What his movement set in motion, however, did not end at his death; its later, more painful chapters — the celibacy decrees and the second wave — are the subject of the final file, noted as aftermath rather than as Toth’s own act.

See Also

References

  • Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint Alexis Toth.” orthodoxcanada.ca — used as locator (the “Father of American Orthodoxy” epithet).
  • “Toth, Alexis.” Encyclopedia.com — used as locator (the demographic basis of the epithet).
  • Herbel, D. Oliver. Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
  • Erickson, John H. Orthodox Christians in America: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • The Saints of North America — this repository, orthodoxy/10-orthodoxy-in-america/mission-and-converts/american-saints.md.