Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Sermons & Homiletics

A Wreath upon the Grave of the Mitred Archpriest Fr. Alexis Georgievich Toth

Archbishop Platon (Rozhdestvensky, 1866–1934)

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: Вѣнокъ на могилу митрофорнаго протоіерея о. Алексія Георгіевича Товта

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:funeral_oration_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.

A Wreath Upon the Grave of the Mitred Archpriest Fr. Alexis Georgievich Toth

1 Oration at the grave of the Archpriest Alexis Toth, who reposed in God.

2 What can I say at this coffin? Can I comfort you, brethren, when I myself am beyond comfort? Can I ease your grief, when I myself grieve and suffer, when I myself cannot look upon this coffin without tears, knowing who lies within it, knowing whom we have lost. Toth is dead.

3 Only two words—yet what grief, what calamity, fallen upon all Orthodox American Rus’, do they express. One does not wish to believe it, but believe it one must when one sees this coffin and him who lies within.

4 A sorrowful event! A grievous loss!

5 It is hard to part forever with those who are dear to the heart, but the weight of our parting with our beloved “batko” [father] is positively boundless. We weep, and our tears are not only a tribute of respect, a tribute of love, a tribute of gratitude to the departed, but also that relief of which we now stand in such need.

6 We shall weep; let the tears flow from our eyes; let us not be ashamed to give voice to our sorrow—let all men know whom we have lost and from whom we now part forever.

7 As the sons of Israel once wept for Moses their leader, as the Saviour Himself wept for His friend at his grave, so weep we also—and not we only who stand about this coffin, but all Orthodox American Rus’ will burst into weeping the moment the news spreads of the death of Fr. Toth: the common friend, the counsellor, the valiant champion, the good and honest man, the faithful and loving son of our Mother the Holy Orthodox Church, devoted without reserve to Her and to Her interests.

8 A deep sorrow will pierce with sharp pain the hearts of all Orthodox Russian people, but this grief will be felt most keenly of all by the archpriest’s bosom companions, his beloved children—the Orthodox people of Wilkes-Barre.

9 He is not with you now, and never again will he be with you, people of Wilkes-Barre—your father, your mitred priest, your glory and your pride. Never again will you hear his loud but unfrightening voice, nor see his stern but unterrifying face. What would you not give to behold that mighty figure of your good batko—but it is not to be, for he has gone away on his own weak legs to that place whence there is no return and into which our gaze cannot penetrate. And you will remember your batko, you will remember him often, often will you talk with one another about him and about your life with him, finding in such conversations consolation and relief in your sorrow. You will remember the beginning of your Orthodox life, when you suffered so with your spiritual father—you will recall that lawsuit which dragged on for six years, when the departed repelled the assaults of the papists and Uniates, who together with their Latin priests appeared in court more than once, and in such numbers, by the departed’s own words, that “it seemed as though the priests were holding their council there.” You will recall, too, the end of that suit, when you lost everything: the church, the parish house, the school, and the cemetery. You will recall how your enemies rejoiced then, and how your batko and you yourselves suffered, and how in your suffering you closed in all the more tightly about your spiritual leader and, to the astonishment of your enemies and your friends alike, in a single year built a magnificent church and a large parish house: you accomplished so great a work then because you gave to your spiritual father not only your souls, but your substance also.

10 Even at that time you understood whom God had sent you in the person of your shepherd of souls, and from then on you and your archpriest made up that parish whose life was always an example to all the parishes of our Orthodox Mission. Your spiritual shepherd raised you up and inspired you to all that is good, holy, and lofty. War breaks out, for instance, between our Russia and Japan, and by your generous offering you publicly declare yourselves the true brothers of the great Russian people; a shelter is established at the monastery, and you go ahead of all in coming to its aid and give more than all toward it; a mission fund is founded, and you make a larger contribution to it than any other parish; an emigrants’ house is set up, and you come forward with such help that no word can express the gratitude due you—under the departed you burned with love for all that is good and performed such works of mercy as set you in the forefront of the Mission and won for you the common esteem and the common gratitude of us all.

11 This is why we too grieve together with you, Orthodox people of Wilkes-Barre—this is why your loss is at the same time ours also; your grief is our grief too, a grief we all share, the grief of all Orthodox American Rus’.

12 Your shepherd laboured not for you alone, but for the whole Mission as well. He lived among you, yet lived not for you alone, but for the whole Mission. No one rejoiced more than he in the joys of the Mission, nor sorrowed more in its sorrows. And this is only natural—for by his labours it was built up, and before his very eyes it grew into what it is today. When he came to America, on the whole continent of the United States there was not a single Russian Orthodox parish, not one Russian Orthodox church, save the cathedral in San Francisco. In the organising of seventeen parishes he took part personally. There was a time when, by his own account, he had charge of newly organised parishes spread over fifteen hundred miles. He had constantly to travel, to perform the services, to build churches… And with what “conveniences” he did so, when he had to contend both with the darkness of the people and with the wiles of the Uniate Latin priests—of that all our missionaries who labour for the glory of holy Orthodoxy are well aware. He endured temptations and attempts on his life, the malice and curses of the papists, slander, assaults, and such a struggle that, as he said more than once, he himself would not have believed it had he not experienced it on his own person.

13 But worst of all, he had to struggle not only with enemies without, but with enemies within as well—to wage a struggle, among other things, even for his daily crust of bread.

14 Soon after his reception into the Orthodox Church (25 March 1891), someone spread the rumour that he had sold his parishioners to the “schismatics” for thousands of dollars. His parishioners of that day believed this “foolish fable” and ceased to pay him his salary. At that time Vladimir, Bishop of the Aleutians, was recalled to Russia, and Fr. Toth was left even without moral support, literally wanting for a crust of bread. The papists’ attacks upon him grew ever stronger and stronger. The archbishop of St. Paul, with the help of the Uniate bishop of Prešov, generously furnished his parishioners with “apostolic epistles,” and at last—as the departed more than once recounted—I was vouchsafed the great honour of being anathematised by the Roman pope himself.

15 And what then? Was he dismayed after all this? Not in the least.

16 He only redoubled his activity. He gave all his strength to enlightening in America the poor Russian people, who had been blinded in Hungary and Galicia. He wrote and published the pamphlet “Where to Look for the Truth”—that pamphlet which scarcely any of the Russian people here are now without—and sent one copy, among others, to the pope himself in Rome; he wrote and circulated appeals and leaflets among the people. He awakened the national Russian self-consciousness; he strove to unite the Russian people here into one whole, into one family, to bind them together not only religiously and morally, but materially as well. At his initiative there was founded in 1895 the “Orthodox Society of Mutual Aid,” which now numbers within it some hundred and fifty brotherhoods, and which now serves as both the foundation of the Mission and the cement binding its members into one whole—a society that helps to build the churches of God and maintains an orphanage. He dealt blow after blow to the Union, and his voice, like a veche bell, rang out in every corner of American Rus’—he called all the Russian people to their native faith, to the faith of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

17 Such is the man, such is the missionary, whom we now bury. His labours have left indelible traces, and his name is written forever upon the pages of the history of Orthodoxy in America. This mighty labourer will live on always in the memory of Orthodox American Rus’, and the memory of him shall not be effaced.

18 Can Fr. Toth be forgotten? Will his closest fellow workers, the reverend missionaries, forget him? Never.

19 What was it that always drew us to Fr. Toth? Why did we always wish to visit him and spend time with him? Why did twenty-six priests pass through his house in one summer alone? Was it because his doors were always open hospitably to all? Was it because at his house one could always find counsel and guidance? Yes, partly for these reasons too, but chiefly because at his house all could find—and did find—moral support and encouragement. Everyone felt the need to visit this man, to enter into brotherly fellowship with him, because all not only felt but knew that here was a man who held definite views on everything and could set forth his thoughts on all things precisely. To everyone it was clear that this man had in his day passed through a period of seeking, had found what he sought, and had come to rest upon it decisively and forever. That is why one would listen to his talk of how his soul had ached and languished in the snares of papism, of how he had suffered, seeing and hearing that Uniate falsehood in whose snares the unhappy part of our Russian people is suffocating even to this day, of how he had sought a way out of an unbearable position, of how he had found at last what he sought, and of how he felt upon finding it—one would listen to such talk and long to listen and listen on, to listen without end. We were drawn to him, drawn irresistibly, because this was a man of integral nature and strong will, a man, if one may so put it, of settled resolve, not of waverings and vacillations. From him each of us not only learned, but near him each felt more sure of himself, and, looking upon him, each took the measure of himself. The labour in this was small, for his good qualities were so characteristic in him and so filled his soul that, for all his wish and effort, he could not conceal them, and everyone could see them and read them upon his face as in an open book.

20 Such is the man we have lost, and this is why we are so beyond comfort. And yet we are far from despair.

21 First of all we, as Christians, take comfort in this: that the “Batko of Orthodox American Rus’” has reached at last that harbour toward which we all are pressing.

22 Indeed, is not the quiet harbour a joy to the seafarer after a stormy voyage? And his voyage was no quiet one. Is not the longed-for house dear to the weary traveller, where he may rest from the burning heat he has borne along the way, where “the sun shall not light on him, nor any heat” (Rev. 7:16)? He has entered into that country which is the land of joy, the dwelling of paradise. Is it fitting, after this, to grieve without measure at his coffin? We cannot but grieve, cannot but weep; yet let us not, brethren, give ourselves over to despair, “for we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor. 5:1).

23 The departed even now is entering that house not made with hands. And so this coffin of his, being a coffin for his earthly life, is for his heavenly life a cradle. Is it fitting, after this, for us at his coffin—I say it again—to give ourselves over to despair? No, let it not be so! We, on the contrary, shall turn to the departed and say to him: Father Archpriest! If you are already entering into the joy of your Lord, then we rejoice with you and rejoice for you. We rejoice and we thank you for what you have done for us and for our holy Orthodox Church in America. We thank you that, in leaving us, you left us the image of an unshakeably firm faith in the truth and the saving power of our holy Orthodox faith, native to the Russian man.

24 Know that your children and fellow workers will never break your covenant and will remain forever faithful and good children of the Holy Orthodox Church of Christ.

25 Know that the memory of you will be handed down in American Rus’ from generation to generation, and that the path to this grave of yours will never grow over with grass.

26 Hither—to your grave—your spiritual children will come, and here they will pray for you and remember you, and, rendering you their prayerful remembrance, will draw new strength for that good life by which every Orthodox Christian ought to live.

27 Father Archpriest! You are now not on the sea but in a quiet harbour, not in exile but in your fatherland, not in bonds but in freedom. We greet you upon the ending of your earthly pilgrimage.

28 We shall never forget you! Do not you forget us either, but pray for us and for our work before the Throne of the Heavenly Father, to Whom be honour and glory unto the ages. Amen.

29 Archbishop PLATON.

Colophon

A Wreath upon the Grave of the Mitred Archpriest Fr. Alexis Georgievich Toth
by Archbishop Platon (Rozhdestvensky, 1866–1934).

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

- A Wreath Upon the Grave of the Mitred Archpriest Fr. Alexis Georgievich Toth

- Colophon