Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Lives of Saints

Who Was Archpriest A. Toth?

Archpriest Alexander Nemolovsky (1880–1960)

Royal Archives

2026

Copyright

The source text and this English translation are in the public domain.

The cover design is © 2026 Royal Archives.

Published by Royal Archives

First published 2026

Source: Кто былъ о. протоіерей А. Товтъ?

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:who_was_archpriest_toth:en:1

Introduction

St Alexis Toth: The Man Commemorated

The two short pieces gathered here were written in grief. In the spring of 1909 the Russian Orthodox mission in America laid to rest one of its founders, and two of its churchmen—a bishop who spoke over the coffin, and a younger priest who wrote a character-sketch to accompany that oration in print—set down what they believed the wider Church needed to remember about him. Both are, in the plainest sense, occasional writings: not treatises, but tributes. Yet across a little more than a century they have become something the authors could hardly have foreseen. The man they mourned as “Old Batko,” the tireless missionary Archpriest Alexis Toth, was glorified as a saint of the Orthodox Church in America in 1994, and these two eulogies now read as among the earliest testimonies to a life the Church has since received as holy.

Alexis Georgievich Toth was born on 14 March 1853 in a village near Prešov (Eperjes), in the Carpathian borderlands of what was then the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He came, like so many of his people, from an Eastern-rite Greek Catholic—“Uniate”—family in which the priesthood was a household inheritance: his father and brother were priests, and an uncle a bishop. Educated at the Uniate seminary at Ungvár and further in theology, he married in 1878 and was ordained that same year. Widowhood came early; his wife and their only child died within a few years, and he turned to teaching and scholarship, serving as a diocesan official and seminary instructor and, as one of the accounts here recalls, as secretary to the bishop of Prešov.

In November 1889 Toth arrived in the United States, sent to serve the swelling communities of Carpatho-Russian and Galician immigrants who had come to labor in the mines and mills of Minnesota and Pennsylvania. He was assigned to the Greek Catholic parish of Minneapolis. There he collided almost at once with Archbishop John Ireland, the Latin-rite Roman Catholic ordinary of St Paul, who—following a policy then hardening across the American hierarchy—declined to recognize the credentials of a married Eastern priest or the legitimacy of his rite. The rupture that followed was decisive. Toth sought out the Russian Orthodox bishop resident in San Francisco, Vladimir (Sokolovsky), and in 1891 he and much of his Minneapolis parish were received into the Orthodox Church, the community being formally enrolled in the Diocese of the Aleutians and North America in the months that followed.

What began as one parish’s homecoming became a movement. Toth traveled ceaselessly—the accounts here speak of journeys of thousands of miles in a single month—preaching, catechizing, and gathering immigrant congregations that had been Eastern Catholic in the old country back into Orthodoxy. By the time of his death he had had a hand in the founding of seventeen parishes, and the return he set in motion is commonly credited with drawing some twenty thousand Carpatho-Russian and Galician faithful, and eventually many more, to the Orthodox Church in America. He spent his last years as rector at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, still writing and counseling, and died there on 7 May 1909. He was buried at St Tikhon’s Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. On 29 May 1994 the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America glorified him as St Alexis of Wilkes-Barre, confessor and defender of Orthodoxy in America; his feast is kept on 7 May.

The Two Accounts: Occasion and Purpose

The pieces translated here are companions, and were meant to be read together. The first, a graveside oration titled A Wreath upon the Grave of the Mitred Archpriest Fr Alexis Georgievich Toth, was delivered at the funeral by Archbishop Platon (Rozhdestvensky), then the ruling hierarch of the North American diocese. The second, a brief essay asking Who Was Archpriest A. Toth?, was written by Alexander Nemolovsky, a mission priest soon to be consecrated a bishop, and functions as a printed frame for the oration—its closing lines point the reader directly toward “the Bishop’s graveside oration” and the “great sorrow” that suffuses it. Both appeared in 1909 in the pages of the American Orthodox Messenger (the Russian Orthodox American Messenger), the mission’s own periodical, in the weeks after Toth’s death.

Their occasion, then, is a single event seen from two vantage points. Platon speaks in the register of the funeral itself—direct address to the mourners of Wilkes-Barre, the raw language of loss, the consolations of Christian hope offered over an open grave. Nemolovsky writes at a slight remove, in the reflective mode of an obituary that tries to say not merely that a great man has died but what made him great. The two purposes are complementary: the oration performs the community’s grief and the essay interprets it, together fixing in print, while memory was fresh, the portrait of a founder the mission did not want forgotten.

It matters that both authors write as insiders and eyewitnesses. Nemolovsky claims direct acquaintance—“as he told us,” he writes of Toth’s confidences—and Platon speaks as the archpastor who knew him at close range and recounts stories heard “by his own account.” These are not the measured reconstructions of a later historian but living testimony, with all the immediacy, and all the partisanship, that living testimony carries.

Argument and Structure

Nemolovsky’s essay opens with a deliberate paradox: the details of Toth’s career—where he was born, where he studied, what honors he held—hardly matter, because greatness is not a résumé. What matters is the single decisive moment, and for Toth that moment was the reunion of 1891, when he and his parish returned to Orthodoxy. From there the sketch traces the shape of a vocation: the priest who came to America already inwardly drawn “toward the East”; the lonely courage of a man who, when a clergy conference debated the step but hesitated, alone broke with the Union; the “thorny road” of the years that followed, evoked through a long passage in Toth’s own words, quoted from his pamphlet A Few More Candid Words, in which he recalls the mockery, the poverty, the pressure to recant, and his refusal to leave his flock. The essay then turns to the fruit of that endurance—the missionary journeys, the seventeen parishes, the authority his very name carried in the councils of the mission—and closes by handing the reader over to Platon’s oration.

Platon’s Wreath is built as a funeral homily in the classical shape: lament, remembrance, consolation. It begins in tears—“Toth is dead,” two words that carry “what grief, what calamity”—and lingers there without apology, likening the mourning to Israel’s weeping for Moses and Christ’s weeping at the grave of His friend. It then turns to memory, and here the oration becomes a compact history of the American mission itself: the six-year lawsuit at Wilkes-Barre, the loss of church and school, the parish rebuilt in a single year; the poverty of Toth’s first Orthodox years, when a rumor that he had sold his people “to the schismatics” cost him even his salary; the founding in 1895 of the Orthodox Society of Mutual Aid; the pamphlet Where to Look for the Truth that “scarcely any of the Russian people here are now without.” From remembrance the oration rises, finally, to consolation—the sailor’s harbor reached after storm, the “house not made with hands” of St Paul—and ends by addressing the departed directly, thanking him and asking his prayers. The movement from unashamed grief to settled hope is the sermon’s whole architecture.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

Neither piece is a work of formal theology, yet both turn on a theological conviction that gives Toth’s life its meaning for their authors: that his return to Orthodoxy was a coming home rather than a conversion—a recovery of the faith “of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers,” as Platon puts it, native to the immigrant people he served. This is the interpretive key to everything the accounts admire in him. His courage, his poverty gladly borne, his refusal to recant under threat of anathema—these are presented not as the traits of a controversialist but as the marks of a confessor, one who suffers for the truth and does not yield. In the Orthodox understanding the eventual glorification of 1994 ratified precisely this reading: Toth was received as a saint under the title of confessor.

The oration’s closing movement carries the deeper spiritual weight. Platon refuses despair not by minimizing the loss but by setting it within the Christian hope of the resurrection: the coffin that is a coffin for the earthly life is “a cradle” for the heavenly; the storm-tossed voyager has reached harbor. Most striking, and most characteristically Orthodox, is the turn at the end from speaking about the dead to speaking to him—asking his intercession before the Throne of God. Delivered over a man not yet reckoned a saint, this is the ordinary Orthodox conviction that the communion of the Church spans death; in retrospect it reads almost as prophecy of the veneration that would one day be offered him openly.

These are also documents of a particular and painful history, and honesty requires that it be named plainly. Toth’s mission unfolded within a long and bitter dispute between the Eastern Catholic (“Uniate”) Churches—communities of Byzantine rite in communion with Rome, established in the Carpathian lands by unions dating to the seventeenth century—and the Orthodox Church from which those communities had earlier been divided. The authors write from one side of that dispute, and they write with the heat of men who lived it. Their pages carry sharp polemic against Rome and the Union, language of “Latin wolves” and papal “bondage” that belongs to the controversialist idiom of their moment. A modern reader—and this edition—need neither adopt that idiom nor pretend it is absent. The historical facts stand on their own: that many thousands of Eastern-rite immigrants, caught between a Latin hierarchy that would not accommodate their tradition and an Orthodox Church that welcomed it, made the change Toth urged; that the change was, for them, freighted with the deepest questions of identity and salvation; and that the wounds of that period have since been the object of patient ecumenical reflection on more than one side. The accounts are best read, then, both as devotion and as evidence—a window onto how one community understood a division that the churches of a later century have labored to heal.

The Witnesses and the Reception

The two authors were themselves men of consequence in the young American Orthodox Church, and something of who they were sharpens the reading. Archbishop Platon (Rozhdestvensky), born in the Kursk province of Russia in 1866, came to America in 1907 as ruling bishop of the Diocese of the Aleutians and North America; a widowed priest turned monk and scholar, he was among the most capable hierarchs the Russian mission sent, and he gave particular attention both to receiving further Carpatho-Rusyn communities into Orthodoxy and to the social needs of immigrants. After an interval of high service in Russia during the revolutionary years he would return to America and, from 1922, lead the church through the storms that followed the collapse of Russian support, becoming the first primate to bear the title Metropolitan of All America and Canada. He died in New York in 1934 and lies, like Toth, at St Tikhon’s Monastery. That the funeral oration printed here is the work of the mission’s own ruling archpastor gives it the weight of an official act of remembrance.

Alexander Nemolovsky, the essay’s author, was born in the Volhynia region of the Russian Empire (the sources give his birth year variously, most placing it around 1876) and came to America after his theological studies to serve mission parishes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In 1909, the very year of Toth’s death, he was consecrated the first vicar bishop of the North American archdiocese; he would go on to lead that archdiocese through the desperately hard years after the Russian Revolution, when funds from Russia ceased, before removing to Europe, where he served for decades as Archbishop of Brussels and Belgium until his death in 1960. His sketch of Toth is thus the tribute of a rising churchman to an elder whose authority he had felt firsthand.

The reception of the man they eulogized outran anything either wrote. For some eight decades Toth was honored locally as a founder; then, in the years before his glorification, his grave at St Tikhon’s was opened and his remains examined, and on 29–30 May 1994 the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America proclaimed him St Alexis of Wilkes-Barre. His shrine at St Tikhon’s is now a place of pilgrimage, and he is widely called the “father of Orthodoxy in America.” Read in that light, these two 1909 pieces are the first draft of a saint’s Life — testimony gathered at the graveside by those who knew him, and later found to have named truly.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents fresh modern English translations of both works, made from the public-domain Russian texts as they appeared in the American Orthodox Messenger of 1909—Nemolovsky’s Кто былъ о. протоіерей А. Товтъ? (“Who Was Archpriest A. Toth?”) and Platon’s Вѣнокъ на могилу... (“A Wreath upon the Grave…”). The translations aim at readable, dignified English while keeping faithfully to the sense and the rhetorical shape of the originals, including the frankly polemical passages, which are rendered as the authors wrote them rather than softened; the introduction above supplies the context in which they are best understood. Where the accounts quote St Alexis Toth’s own words—the extended passage from his pamphlet A Few More Candid Words — the quotation is reproduced as the author gave it. Scripture passages in Platon’s oration follow the familiar King James wording of the verses he cites (Revelation 7:16; 2 Corinthians 5:1), with citations given in the modern Arabic form.

The house conventions of this series are observed throughout. St Alexis Toth is named as the Church now receives him—a glorified saint, confessor of Orthodoxy in America—while the two texts themselves, being contemporary with his death, naturally speak of him simply as the beloved archpriest. The authors are credited as authors and the modern renderers as translators, never the reverse. Chapter and section numbering and scriptural references follow the series’ standard Arabic style. Because these are two distinct works by two hands, they are kept separate as such, gathered here under the figure they hold in common; the pairing is editorial, meant to let the reader hear the funeral oration and its printed frame as their first audience heard them—together.

Suggestions for Reading

A reader new to this history will do well to begin with Nemolovsky’s essay, which is the shorter and offers the broad outline of Toth’s career, and then turn to Platon’s oration, which fills that outline with the texture of a life and the emotion of its ending—the order in which the two were meant to be read. It helps to keep in mind the immigrant world behind them: villages emptied into American mill towns, a people uncertain whether the churches of the new country were truly their own, and one priest whose choice gave many of them an answer. The polemical edge of both pieces is best met not as the editor’s judgment but as the voice of a particular moment in a long and sorrowful division—a division that the Christian churches of our own time have sought, in humility, to understand and to heal. Read that way, these small tributes open onto something larger than themselves: the story of how Orthodoxy took root on American soil, and of the man his people would not let the Church forget.

Who Was Archpriest A. Toth?

1 Scarcely anyone among the members of the Mission knows the detailed biographical particulars of Archpriest Toth, for all his renown. And indeed it is not necessary to know where Fr. Toth was born, where he studied, or what honours he received, in order to say who he was.

2 Herein, precisely, lies the real difference between great men and petty little men, from whom, if you take away their record of service, nothing is left. With a great man, on the contrary, to set down a detailed record of service is, as it were, an affront to him. The one thing that matters is to mark the moment from which a given man became great. And that moment was the reunion, in 1891, of Fr. Alexis Toth—and with him the whole Minneapolis Uniate parish—with the Orthodox Church.

3 A man of thirty-six, in the full flower of his powers of soul and body, Fr. Toth came to America. Having been secretary to Nikolai Toth, bishop of Prešov, Fr. A. Toth had no wish to drop into second place under his successor, John Valyi, and so he resolved to seek a wider field for his activity in America.

4 Like Fr. Ivan Naumovich of blessed memory, Fr. Toth too ached in his soul, seeing the Russian faith and the Russian rite reviled in his native land. He himself—thanks to the influence of his father, a Uniate priest, and especially of Bishop Nikolai Toth, who in candid moments would tell his secretary that “from Rome one should always expect nothing but swinishness”—never sought salvation in Rome; he was drawn with heart and soul toward the East, and, as he told us, dreamed that upon coming to America he would accomplish the great work of liberating the Russian people from Roman bondage.

5 In America Fr. Toth already found several Uniate priests; a number of Russian churches had, of course, been built—and over all of these there weighed the hostile hand of the Irish bishops, who on every possible occasion sought to abase the “holy Union” and its faithful servants, the Russian priests; while the people—naturally—remained in the blissful conviction that they were truly Orthodox, the very same as was holy Prince Vladimir.

6 The straightforward Fr. Toth was displeased, too, by the double-dealing that circumstances forced upon the Russian priests, who—knowing perfectly well who they were—had to assure the people that they were Orthodox (or at least not to disclose that they were Roman Catholics of the Greek rite); and he was displeased still more by the despotism of the Irish bishops, with one of whom—namely, the one in St. Paul—Fr. Toth clashed from the very first days of his arrival.

7 Before long a congress of the clergy was convened under Fr. Toth’s chairmanship. They debated and deliberated long, and even secretly resolved to embrace Orthodoxy. But when it came to the point, Fr. Toth alone had the courage to break with the Union and embrace Orthodoxy; and he, having learned of the existence of an Orthodox Russian bishop in San Francisco, placed himself under his jurisdiction.

8 “The news that I had left the Union (writes Fr. Toth in his pamphlet A Few More Candid Words) and joined my own native Church was met with general congratulations and approval from my former brethren. One cannot read without amusement the sympathetic letters I received at the time. Such, for instance, is the letter of Cornelius Lavrišin, in which he bitterly complains of Mullen, the bishop of Erie, and applauds my “manly” deed… Or the letter of Hanat, in which he expresses himself most “approvingly” on the score of my so “manfully” defending the rights of “our church”. Some of the brethren even came to me in person at Minneapolis, declaring their readiness to do the same as I had done, if only—so they said—their family circumstances did not stand in their way…

9 There were found, however, brethren of another sort, who began to suspect and accuse me of having “changed my faith” for the sake of material advantage. And yet for more than a year after embracing Orthodoxy I hung, as the saying goes, between heaven and earth.

10 I received no salary, I had no privileges; on the contrary, I suffered and was persecuted at that time to the utmost. The archbishop of St. Paul demanded that I be recalled to Europe as the instigator and chairman of the priests’ congress, and the bishop of Prešov carried out his wish; but I did not abandon the flock entrusted to me to the mercy of fate and to be devoured by the rapacious Latin wolves… Curses rained down, as though I had sold my conscience and my faith for thirty thousand roubles to the schismatics and the Muscovites; apostolic encyclicals of the bishop of Prešov arrived, full of absurdities, and insulted my late father, and so on and so forth—while in fact I often had not even my daily bread… From threats and intimidation they went over to consequences: they proposed that I leave Minneapolis and remove for a time to some other parish in America, and then return again—all, they said, would be forgiven and forgotten, and it would not tell upon my future career… But, for all my privations, I did not turn aside from my thorny road…”

11 And that road was thorny indeed. One cannot but marvel at the astonishing energy, the tirelessness, and the patience with which Fr. Toth acted in the first years of his labours. Like a meteor he flew across the firmament of American Rus’ and everywhere kindled the lamps of Orthodoxy among the Russian people—for how else can one describe his missionary journeys of thousands of miles in a single month?!

12 And Rus’ awoke and turned toward Orthodoxy. There were—of course—failures too, assaults and attempts upon his life. The Uniate newspapers hounded this champion of Orthodoxy and laid to his charge the most vile of crimes. But nothing in the world could break Fr. Toth’s iron will, nothing could quench his fiery zeal for the spread of Orthodoxy. And the fruit of his apostolic labours was the founding of seventeen Orthodox parishes!

13 Soon other missionaries appeared—Fr. Toth’s helpers. The “Old Batko” could now rest a little. And in his last years he did indeed “rest”—that is, he now seldom made missionary journeys; but with his matchless pen, in the cause of Orthodoxy, he did in these last years no less, if not more, than in the first years of his labours!

14 A connoisseur of Latinism and of the Union as no one else in the Mission, a psychologist who penetrated into every recess of the soul of the Austrian Rusins, his own kin, a most skilful polemicist with a touch of humour; no slow-thinker, but one who caught the phenomena of life swiftly on the wing and gave them a deep and true interpretation—Fr. Toth so mightily shook the Union, laid bare so thoroughly all the cunning sophistries of the pope’s hangers-on, and so matchlessly defended the holy truth of Orthodoxy against the assaults of its enemies, that for us—the continuers of his great work—there remains nothing new to say in this regard, and it only remains to read the writings of Fr. Toth more attentively and to draw from them with generous hand the eternal, holy truths he bore in his heart and won through the sufferings of his soul. And the little book “Where to Look for the Truth”, which did so much for the spread of Orthodoxy among the Russian people and in Austria, will remain forever a kind of catechism of the historical and dogmatic truth of Orthodoxy and the falsehood of the Union.

15 One may say that in eighteen years nothing of importance in our Mission was accomplished without Fr. Toth, who, even if at times he did not take part in person, unfailingly gave his counsel and his guidance, which enjoyed among us an unquestioned authority.

16 The phrase “So Toth has said” had a magical force in the deciding of this or that important question. And this was because both the chief shepherds and the shepherds were deeply convinced of Fr. Toth’s boundless devotion to Orthodoxy and deeply believed in his great mind and his knowledge of the people’s soul.

17 As for the common people, they simply venerated their enlightener, accounting him truly their batko, to see and to speak with whom was reckoned already a kind of happiness and a matter of pride.

18 His enemies, of course, uttered Fr. Toth’s name with fury and with curses, but even they could not in their hearts but bow before this remarkable personality, and did not scruple to express openly their regret at Fr. Toth’s departure into Orthodoxy.

19 Such is the man Archpriest Toth was. Hence is understandable that great sorrow, and that especially heartfelt warmth, with which the Bishop’s graveside oration is suffused. Understandable, too, are those exclamations of the chief shepherd with which he now so often breaks off his discourse: “Ah, what a pity for Fr. Toth!”

Colophon

Who Was Archpriest A. Toth?
by Archpriest Alexander Nemolovsky (1880–1960).

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The text is set in Palatino and Georgia.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
August 16, 2026.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Introduction
- Who Was Archpriest A. Toth?
- Colophon