Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Polemics & Heresiology

Tempi Passati (Times Gone By)

Saint Alexis Toth (1854–1909)

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: Tempi Passati

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:tempi_passati:en:1

Introduction

The Author

Alexis Georgievich Toth was born in the Carpathian uplands of Austria-Hungary, in the region the people themselves called Carpatho-Russia, in the spring of 1853—some accounts, including his vita as kept by the Orthodox Church in America, give 1854. He came of a clerical family in the Eastern-rite tradition: his father and a brother were priests, and an uncle a bishop, in the Greek-Catholic (Uniate) Church that had for generations been the ancestral confession of the Rusyn mountain villages. He was well schooled for a poor man’s son—at home in Carpatho-Russian, Hungarian, Russian, German, and Latin, with a reading command of Greek—and after ordination in 1878 he served as a parish priest, then as a diocesan secretary and a professor of Church history and canon law at the seminary in Prešov. Early sorrow marked him: his young wife and their only child died soon after his ordination, and he lived the rest of his life as a widowed priest.

The turning of his life came with emigration. In 1889 he was appointed to serve the Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants who had crowded into the mines and mill towns of the American Northeast, and he took up the new Greek-Catholic parish of St. Mary’s in Minneapolis. There he met a wall. The Roman Catholic archbishop of St. Paul, John Ireland, was then pressing to “Americanize” the immigrant Church under a uniform Latin discipline, and he declined to recognize a married Eastern priest as a legitimate Catholic clergyman or to grant him faculties to serve. The rebuff, and the deeper question it forced open—whether the Union with Rome had ever been the native faith of his people, or a later imposition upon an originally Orthodox Church—drove Toth and his parishioners to look eastward. In February 1891 he made contact with the Russian Orthodox bishop in San Francisco, Vladimir (Sokolovsky); and on March 25, 1891, the bishop received Father Alexis together with 361 of his Minneapolis parishioners into the Orthodox Church. Formal recognition by the Holy Synod of Russia followed in 1892.

What began as one parish’s decision became a movement. Toth traveled ceaselessly among the scattered immigrant colonies, and by preaching, correspondence, and the pamphlet he drew Uniate congregation after congregation back to Orthodoxy; the Orthodox record credits him with the return of some seventeen parishes and a hand in founding many more, and with tens of thousands of individual souls over the following decades. It was thankless and impoverished labor—for a time, before any salary reached him from Russia, he supported himself working in a bakery—and it earned him the bitter charge of having sold his people to the “Muscovites.” He answered in print, founding and filling Orthodox periodicals and writing plain-spoken catechetical and apologetic tracts for the ordinary Rusyn reader. In his last years the Church honored him with a jeweled miter and Russian imperial orders; in 1907 he declined election to the episcopate on grounds of failing health. He reposed on May 7, 1909, at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. On May 29, 1994, the Orthodox Church in America glorified him as Saint Alexis of Wilkes-Barre, Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in America; his relics rest at St. Tikhon’s Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, and he is commemorated on May 7.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

Tempi Passati — “Times Gone By”—is a short occasional essay, not a treatise, and reading it rightly begins with recognizing its modest scale. It is a single sustained piece of some nineteen paragraphs, written for the Orthodox immigrant press rather than for the study, and its provenance is inseparable from a particular news event of the late summer of 1908.

That September, London hosted the nineteenth International Eucharistic Congress, the largest Roman Catholic gathering England had seen since the Reformation. Pope Pius X sent as his legate Cardinal Vincenzo Vannutelli—the first papal legate on English soil in more than three centuries—attended by a train of cardinals, bishops, and priests. The planned climax was a public procession of the Blessed Sacrament through the streets of London. Militant Protestant societies protested that such a procession violated statutes still technically on the books restricting Catholic public ceremonies, and under the resulting pressure the Liberal prime minister, H. H. Asquith, forbade the carrying of the Host and the wearing of ecclesiastical vestments in the open march. The procession went forward in ordinary clerical dress, through crowds in which cheering and hostile hooting mingled—a scene vivid enough to be reported at length in the American press.

Toth, by then a veteran Orthodox archpriest and a practiced polemical journalist, seized upon that scene. Writing for the diocesan American Orthodox Messenger (the Amerikansky Pravoslavny Vestnik) in 1908, he built his essay around a long verbatim quotation of the New York newspaper The Sun’s report on the procession—which he reproduces, dated in both the Julian and Gregorian styles as 1/14 September 1908—and used the London spectacle as a text on which to preach a larger thesis: that the old temporal and spiritual dominance of the papacy belongs to a vanished age. His purpose was frankly persuasive and confirmatory. He wrote to reassure and to fortify his Carpatho-Rusyn readers—recent returnees to Orthodoxy, or those still weighing the step—that in leaving the Union with Rome they had not abandoned the winning side of history but the losing one, and that the papal grandeur they had been taught to revere was, as his refrain insists, tempi passati. Within his own corpus the piece sits apart from his most enduring work, the catechetical pamphlet Where to Seek the Truth? of 1893, which lays out the case for Orthodoxy against the Union in patient question-and-answer form. Tempi Passati is the same conviction in a different key: brief, topical, and rhetorical.

Argument & Structure

The essay is organized less as an argument than as a rising and falling meditation on a single refrain. It opens with a sweeping evocation of medieval Rome at the height of its power—the Rome of Gregory VII, Innocent III, and Boniface VIII, whose anathemas could silence church bells, close cathedral doors, and unseat kings. That grandeur is summoned only to be measured against the present: the pope, Toth observes, is now “the prisoner of the Vatican,” a foreign flag flies over the Castel Sant’Angelo and the Quirinal, and it was the pope’s own Roman and Italian people who, in the unification of Italy, stripped away the temporal power. The Latin tag that gives the piece its title — tempi passati, “times gone by”—tolls at the end of paragraph after paragraph like a bell.

From this historical overture Toth turns to his contemporary charge: that the papacy, refusing to accept its diminishment, works now by quieter means—through congresses, confraternities, and “Catholic unions”—to recover by stealth what it can no longer command by force. The London Eucharistic Congress becomes his case in point. He narrates the run-up in the Catholic press, the alarm of the English Protestant societies, the “Protestant Alliance’s” appeal to Asquith, and the prime minister’s decision to bar the Host and the vestments from the street. He then yields the floor almost entirely to The Sun, quoting three long paragraphs describing the procession itself—the mounted police, the hurricane of hoots and yells, the crowd surging against the cordon, and Cardinal Vannutelli walking through it all with his head thrown back and a calm smile, his hand raised in blessing over the hundreds who knelt as he passed.

In his closing movement Toth draws his lesson, and here his even-handedness, such as it is, briefly shows: he calls it sad that twentieth-century English Protestants should imitate the very intolerance they condemn, invoking the Latin proverb exempla trahunt — “examples draw others on.” But the weight of the peroration falls on Rome. The recent glory the congresses hope to revive, he concludes, cannot be won back; the days of Gregory VII and Innocent III will not return; the papal thunderbolt is now “a firework that harms no one.” The essay ends where it began, on its refrain, signed simply “Archpriest Alexis Toth.”

Theological & Spiritual Significance

Tempi Passati is a document of confessional controversy, and it should be read as one—a specimen of the sharp East–West polemical writing that flourished in the immigrant Church at the turn of the twentieth century, when the boundary between Eastern Catholicism and Orthodoxy was being contested parish by parish across the American coalfields. Its theological substance lies less in systematic argument than in a cast of mind. Toth’s quarrel with the papacy is, at root, the classic Orthodox objection to the claims of universal papal supremacy and infallibility; the essay presses that objection not by patristic citation but by pointing to history, treating the collapse of the pope’s temporal sovereignty as a kind of visible verdict on his spiritual pretensions. This is polemic in the older manner: it argues from spectacle and reversal of fortune rather than from doctrine, and its confidence that historical decline discredits a religious claim is very much of its age.

That age’s register is unmistakable, and a modern reader should meet it with historical understanding rather than surprise. Toth writes with the mordant edge of the confessional press: he punctuates papal titles with skeptical question marks, marshals the standard catalogue of the era’s anti-Roman memory—St. Bartholomew’s Night, the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of Hus, Jerome of Prague, and Savonarola, the pressures on the Orthodox in old Poland—and turns each against the boast of Catholic “tolerance.” These are the commonplaces of a long and bitter rhetorical tradition on both sides, deployed here as they were deployed by controversialists across the divide; they are reported in this edition as part of the historical record of that dispute, not endorsed as its settled verdict. It is worth noticing, too, that Toth’s polemic is not simply one-directional: he reproaches the Protestant mob for its own intolerance and lets the dignity of Cardinal Vannutelli’s bearing stand unmocked in the quoted passage, so that even within a hostile essay a certain human fairness surfaces.

For the reader today the piece has a double value. As history, it is a rare firsthand window into the mind and the method of the man who, more than any other, turned the Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants of America back toward Orthodoxy—showing how he read the news of the wider Christian world and pressed it into the service of his mission. As a spiritual document, beneath the controversy it carries a pastoral intent that outlasts its occasion: to steady the convictions of a displaced and anxious people, and to assure them that the faith of their ancestors, however humble it looked beside Roman splendor, was the enduring thing. The controversy it engages has, in the century since, given way to formal dialogue and mutual respect between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions; the essay is best received now as a witness to how that estrangement was once felt and argued, from one particular and consequential vantage.

Reception & Influence

The lasting significance of Tempi Passati is bound up with the lasting significance of its author. In his own lifetime Toth’s writings—the catechetical Where to Seek the Truth?, his articles in the American Orthodox Messenger and the Rusyn-language press, his practical counsels on how Slavic immigrants should live in the New World—were instruments of a mass movement. Distributed among people who were largely poor, recently arrived, and hungry for a language in which to understand their own religious loyalties, they helped carry congregation after congregation from the Union back to Orthodoxy, and they made Toth’s name a byword for the “return” in the American Orthodox memory.

That memory was formally consecrated in 1994, when the Orthodox Church in America glorified him as Saint Alexis of Wilkes-Barre, honoring him as a confessor—one who suffered contempt, poverty, and calumny for the faith without shedding blood. His feast is kept on May 7, the day of his repose, and his relics are venerated at St. Tikhon’s Monastery in Pennsylvania. In that light the small, sharp essay reprinted here takes on more than antiquarian interest: it is a page from the working life of a saint, one of the countless occasional labors through which he spent himself on behalf of his people. Read within his canonized life, its polemical heat is inseparable from the pastoral devotion the Church came to honor.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents a fresh, modern English translation of Tempi Passati, prepared for study and general reading. The work is not one of the ancient Fathers rendered from Greek or Latin; it is a piece of turn-of-the-century immigrant journalism, and its original language is Russian. St. Alexis composed it for the diocesan periodical American Orthodox Messenger in 1908, and the translation here has been made from the public-domain Russian text of that printing. The essay is short—a single continuous piece—and this edition preserves its integrity as such, without imposing artificial divisions on what its author wrote as one sustained address.

Several features of the original have been carried across deliberately. Toth wrote in the learned macaronic style of his generation, salting his Russian with Latin tags — Urbs aeterna, Roma locuta, causa finita, Pontifex Maximus, religio dominans, exempla trahunt — and these are retained in the text with their sense available to the reader, since the flavor of the writing depends on them. The long English-language passages that Toth quoted from the New York newspaper The Sun have been restored to their original English wording rather than back-translated, so that the reader encounters that reportage as his first readers did. His own dual dating of the newspaper, in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars, is preserved.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the work is attributed to its author as the Church receives him—St. Alexis Toth, glorified in 1994—and those who prepared the translation are credited as translators, never as authors. Scriptural and other references follow the house style, with numerals given in the ordinary Arabic form. The aim throughout has been an accurate, readable English text that lets a modern reader hear this brief and pointed essay in something close to the voice, and the temper, of the man who wrote it.

Suggestions for Reading

A newcomer will get the most from Tempi Passati by holding two things in mind at once. The first is its occasion: this is a topical essay, written in the heat of a specific news story of September 1908, and its energy is that of the opinion column rather than the catechism. Read it as one would read a gifted, combative correspondent writing for his own community about an event in the wider world. The second is its author’s situation: behind the sweeping talk of popes and empires stands a parish priest speaking to displaced miners and millworkers, laboring to give them confidence in a faith they had only lately reclaimed. Set against the sharp confessional rhetoric of its time—which the reader should take as the idiom of the age’s controversies, on all sides, rather than as an even judgment on the Roman Catholic Church—the essay opens a genuine and human window onto the mind of a saint at work, and onto one vivid moment in the long, and now more hopeful, history of relations between the Christian East and West.

Tempi Passati (Times Gone By)

1 Rome can in no way forget its former glory and power—not its pagan glory, but Rome after the papal fashion, Rome!.. Urbs aeterna!.. Here, from the Castel Sant’Angelo, thunders and curses once pealed; here Gregory VII, Innocent III, and Boniface VIII issued their threats—and at their word, at their command, nations refused obedience to their own tsars, emperors, and princes; whole states groaned beneath the papal anathema. By the pope’s prohibition one could neither baptize, nor wed, nor bury the dead; the bells fell silent, the church doors were shut—for so willed, so desired the Pontifex Maximus, the Jupiter tonans, the supposed “successor” of the humble fisherman St. Peter, the “vicar of God,” the “infallible” visible “head” of the papal church!

2 Ah, happy were those days! The whole West, the South, and in part the North listened in fear and trembling to his wishes, his words, and his commands; the East alone, where the apostolic light of Christ truly shone, would not bow its head before him. That East the popes did not spare the “sword of Peter”: by deceit and by force, to subdue the East, they entered into alliance with the enemies of the Church of Christ and blessed the Turkish hosts… Alas, that too is now “tempi passati.”

3 All that has passed away, all is tempi passati! In Rome—in aeterna Urbe—the pope is no longer master; over the Castel Sant’Angelo a foreign flag now flies, and so too over the Quirinal. The “infallible vicar (?) of God” plays the ridiculous part of a prisoner of the Vatican—though no one keeps him captive there; yet how keenly we feel that beside him another master dwells in urbe aeterna: the King of Italy!

4 Woe! woe! Who, then, stripped the pope of his earthly power? Pagans, heretics, schismatics? Oh no! The pope’s own beloved “chosen people,” from whose midst the Holy Spirit (?!) selects the popes—those very Romans, the Italians, drove the pope out of the Quirinal and abolished the kingdom of the popes—down to the bounds of the Vatican palace?! Henceforth the lightning of papal curses may still flash now and then, but no one any longer takes it seriously, for everyone knows it is nonsense, a papal plaything, a firework that harms no one!

5 Hard it is to forget those glorious, great times! “I remembered the days of old,” says the psalmist; and our whole world feels pain and grief at these words. The spirit of the age, and enlightenment, have sharply changed our century; but that is already past—it is all tempi passati!

6 But papism would not be papism if it rested content with such a state of affairs. It refuses to believe that the world will not return to the Middle Ages, that “Roma locuta, causa finita” is now mere fiction, that its significance, that papal power, is no longer the religio dominans—even there where the faithful of the papacy live! And meanwhile such powers as France, Austria, and Italy were the first to shake off the yoke and the darkness of papism, and in their social and political life the pope plays no greater part than a fifth wheel on a cart.

7 Papism, however, does not sleep; it works by stealth—no longer openly, but by sundry means, in Pharisaic fashion, quietly, under various mottoes of piety; and it bares its teeth only when it reckons that the foundations of that secret labor are already firm enough that no one can withstand papism! Examples in many instances show how far it has gone—and how it has deceived even itself—as, for example, lately came to pass at the London “Eucharistic Congress” of this year. The bygone glory of papism these various “congregations,” “Catholic unions,” so-called “Catholic assemblies,” “congresses,” “Apostleships of the Heart of Jesus”—and God knows what other names those societies bear, each with its own appointed secret aim—are eager to revive.

8 Already at the beginning of this year the papal newspapers began to discourse upon the coming congress—but very piano! First they had to feel out what the Protestants of England thought of it. But the moment they caught the scent, the papal press began to sniff it out in the loudest tones. They struck up a tune about what “glory” it would be for England—quite otherwise than in 1554, when Cardinal Pole first came to England in like manner; the paper “Echo de Paris” in particular poured itself out in “doxologies” to the congress—namely, that the papal legate, Cardinal Vannutelli, would take part in it…

9 …Vannutelli, and six other cardinals besides, a hundred bishops, and more than a thousand priests! And the chief thing—says this paper—is that the congress takes on great significance because it will be held on Protestant soil! By this the secret design of papism against Protestantism was plainly betrayed!.. And yet all the papal newspapers had insisted at first that the congress had no wish whatever to be demonstrative, that it did not intend to touch the feelings of the Protestants!.. This only roused the Protestants of England the more, especially when they learned how far in advance the audacity of the papists in England reached: the papists began to demand, with threats, that the papal legate, Cardinal Vannutelli, take part with honor in an official procession.

10 The Protestant union, the “Protestant Alliance,” protested against such a wish—that the “head” of the Anglican Church should officially receive the pope’s legate; more than that, the Protestant union went on to demand that no minister conduct a procession through the streets demonstratively with the “Host”—in general this Union wished to forbid all outward demonstrations. What especially galled the Protestants was the discovery that the government had mustered fifteen thousand constables to guard the papal procession during the public march… while the papists were ready, and even eager, to shed their blood for the faith, for the pope and his legate.

11 The “Protestant Alliance” appealed directly to the Prime Minister, Asquith, with its demands, and laid upon him the whole responsibility for any disorders that might follow. The Prime Minister Asquith, with his resolute temper, replied that although he was indeed the “head” of the Anglican Church, he himself could not officially receive the pope’s legate; secondly, he forbade any procession with the “Host”; and he even forbade the cardinals, bishops, and priests to be vested in ecclesiastical robes during the procession! This was an unexpected, but also a heavy blow for the papists. In vain did the Westminster papal archbishop protest—nothing availed! Asquith held his ground, and the congress had to comply!

12 At last the critical day of the procession arrived. A crowd of a hundred thousand awaited the cardinals, bishops, and priests as they came forth from the cathedral church, dressed indeed only in their “reverends’” cassocks, and not in ecclesiastical vestments! The papists began with enthusiasm to greet their bishops and cardinals, but at that very moment there arose a fearful shouting, din, whistling, and abuse from the Protestants! How that procession went is most vividly described by the New York Roman Catholic and tendentious newspaper “The Sun,” of 1/14 September 1908:

13 “Its approach was at last heralded by mounted police, behind whom some banners were visible. Then followed such a scene the like of which one who has taken part in every great crowd in London in the past eleven years has never seen. A hurricane of hoots and yells went up to greet the advance guard of the procession. The mob swept forward, bearing the police with it. Mingled with yells could be heard the shrieks of women, while children, sitting in safety in windows just above the heads of the crowd, could be seen crying in fright.”

14 “The police drove the crowd back foot by foot. They used all the force that was safe, hurling men to the ground right and left, until in a few minutes the line of processionists was cut in two, and for a couple of minutes it seemed as though it would never be able to go on. Then, once more, by a supreme effort, a narrow opening was made which allowed the parade to trickle through. Had Cardinal Vannutelli, the Papal Legate, carrying the Host, reached this corner at the moment the procession was cut, nothing could have prevented a most lamentable occurrence.”

15 “Through this yelling mob Cardinal Vannutelli walked slowly, with his head thrown back, looking straight forward, with a calm smile on his face, his tall figure towering above the other Cardinals behind him and the priests before him. Hundreds risked injury by kneeling as Cardinal Vannutelli passed with his hand raised in blessing. But throughout, even when the cheers predominated, there was an undercurrent of hooting, and such cries as ‘Go back to Rome!’ were heard.”

16 It is sad, of course, that the Protestants of England, especially in the twentieth century, should imitate the intolerance of the papists; but the Latin proverb says, “Exempla trahunt”—the Protestants have had good teachers: the papists! St. Bartholomew’s Night, the Spanish Inquisition, the stakes of Hus, of Jerome of Prague, of Savonarola and the rest—these are the most vivid examples of papal “tolerance,” and of the savagery of the papists in old Poland against the Orthodox! Where, then, is that historical “heritage” of tolerance of which the papists so love to boast?

17 Besides, one must say from the heart what the papists are really after with their “Eucharistic Congress”: here they wish to display in glory “Jesus Christ present in the Host,” but in truth they take thought for the glory and the supremacy of the pope, beneath whose slipper the papists would gladly subdue England. Yet by now both the papists and their “infallible” vicar (?) of Christ, for all his glory, can see that the present age can no longer be turned back into the Middle Ages, that the glory of the pope is gone, that all has passed away, that the golden days of Gregory VII and Innocent III are days long vanished… tempi passati!

18 Those times can be renewed neither by “Katholiken-Tag” rallies nor by “Eucharistic Congresses”… and the pope shall not win them back! These various demonstrations are mere soap-bubbles that will soon burst! Certain newspapers, it is reported, are pleased with the results of the “Eucharistic Congress”! Well, what is to be done? It seems that this consolation of the pope’s is nothing other than a Consolatio ad lachrymas!.. and in that he is hardly to be envied!

19 Archpriest Alexis Toth

Colophon

Tempi Passati (Times Gone By)
by Saint Alexis Toth (1854–1909).

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
- Tempi Passati (Times Gone By)
- Colophon