May 7, 2014

Saint Alexis Toth: Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in North America

St Alexis Toth
St Alexis Toth

I was at the canonization of Saint Alexis during Memorial Day weekend in 1994 at Saint Tikhon’s Monastery. Along with scores of priests taking turns, I had the privilege of helping to carry his heavy casket in procession, and I remember thinking that this was much more than a symbolic act: the casket was really heavy and I felt it digging into my shoulder. The day was an inspiring, uplifting event and I was caught up in it. The crowds of Orthodox pilgrims, all the priests, the singing, the sense of God’s presence in our midst. But I have to confess that I never warmed up to Saint Alexis until recently. After all, he was an implacable foe of Roman Catholics and the Uniates. Even that word “uniate” I can’t say without cringing, because it is an offensive, pejorative term for Eastern Catholics (or Greek-Catholics), many of whom I count as friends and colleagues.

In this lecture I would like to explore some of this tension.  We can and must learn from the character of Saint Alexis, but all for a very different set of spiritual threats to our mission today in North America.  Saint Alexis battled with Papacy and Uniatism. That is not our battle today. Old world tensions still exist, but we should not import them here.

Saint Alexis was a Greek Catholic priest from a poor Carpatho-Russian family, sent to America in 1889 to serve the parish right here in Minneapolis. When he presented himself to the local Roman Catholic Archbishop John Ireland, as protocol required, there was that infamous conversation in Latin—or blow up—between the two of them that resulted in Father Alexis seeking out the Russian Orthodox bishop and bringing his parish back into Orthodoxy. Archbishop Ireland wanted uniformity, an American Catholic church that was not balkanized by ethnic allegiances. But in his zeal for what we might argue was not a bad goal—and one we as Orthodox in America today might embrace for ourselves—he neglected to care for the people in front of him. In fact, he despised them. He despised the very idea of Slavic-speaking, bearded and—worst of all—married priests. Saint Alexis would have happily remained an Eastern Catholic priest if Archbishop Ireland’s attitude had been different, but his hand was forced. That whole process took some time, and the parish didn’t receive formal notification until October 1892. And that meant that in the interim, as your parish website puts it, “ there was a climate of religious and ethnic hostility against the new converts.”

There’s no doubt that many of Saint Alexis’ writings are plainly insulting. For example, he had this to say about the childishness of one of his one of his Greek Catholic priest-opponents: “He has not grown out of the diapers still attached to his backside; he should have a rattle in his hand and a bib around his neck, not a chalice and priest’s vestments”.  Father Alexis was depicted by his enemies as a Judas who had sold out his people. From then on, until the end of his life in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1909, he faced slander, court cases, physical attacks and poverty (he had to work as a baker to make ends meet, and was deeply in debt when he died—mainly because of building churches).

In reviewing the life of Saint Alexis I was struck by his fighting quality. He fought for the Church, he was embattled but he pressed forward, he was vilified, he suffered but he was not dissuaded from his mission, which he understood as God’s mission for the people entrusted to him. Our icons of Saint Alexis show him as he is now, at peace, in the Kingdom of God, but his title is “Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in America.”

Fighters make people uncomfortable. We generally don’t like conflict. We shy away from it and from people who foment it. Bosses and bishops especially don’t like conflict coming from their underlings, so Bishop John Ireland’s infamous conversation with Saint Alexis was bound to end badly. I’m sure Bishop Ireland might have muttered to himself, the same words King Henry II said of Thomas Becket, “will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” Yes, Saint Alexis was a fighter, a man of character and conviction who defended his people and his faith. The historical core of the Orthodox Church in America can still be traced to his missionary labors, as he and his followers brought thousands of their compatriots—Eastern Catholics from Carpathia, Galicia and Bukovina into the Orthodox Church.

St Alexis Toth
Icon, relics, and stole of St Alexis.

Today, we do not have the same fight on our hands.  The “Papists” and “Uniates” are not our enemies. Likewise, there was a widespread and widely acceptable anti-Semitic language that Saint Alexis adopted as normal. Here is his comment for example on the persecution of Orthodox converts in the Austro-Hungarian empire: “It is well known that in Hungary all the press is in the hands of baptized and unbaptized Jews (4.62)…How can a logical and just behavior be expected at all from a Hungarian or a Polack when a Jew sits on his neck?” (4.63). These aspects of Saint Alexis’ world were acceptable, and even understandable in his time and place, perhaps especially in light of the very real persecutions he and his people endured, but they are not today. That is where my tension about Saint Alexis comes in, not with him—because he was a man of his time—but with those who would misuse Saint Alexis today, especially in relation to Eastern Catholics. 

It is true that in the past the Roman Catholic church actively pursued a policy of uniatism as a method to bring the Orthodox under the wing of the Vatican. That is no longer true. On the contrary, he Catholic Church has renounced “uniatism” as a form of mission, and many Eastern Catholics complain that Rome shows much more sensitivity and favoritism to the Orthodox than to their own Eastern Catholics, who remain something of a historical embarrassment to much of Roman Catholic officialdom.  But we still need to live with the present reality, and that includes millions of faithful in 22 Eastern Catholic Churches, of which the largest is the Ukrainian Catholic Church. And they have been living as eastern Catholics for 500 years.

In honoring Saint Alexis, we remember the persecution he and the Orthodox endured from the Catholics, but we need to keep in mind that Ukrainian Catholics also faced persecution on several fronts. From the Orthodox, from Roman Catholics (like Archbishop John Ireland) who did not understand, appreciate or welcome them, and later from the Soviet Union, with the collaboration of the Russian Orthodox Church. Stalin suppressed the Ukrainian Catholics in 1946 but with the fall of communism, there was an unexpected resurgence of the Ukrainian Catholic Church after 1988. From into the 1990’s there were battles between Ukrainian Catholics and Orthodox over land and church properties, and these battles are still fresh in the minds of many on both sides. If hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Catholics lost their churches and had to go underground after 1946, many Orthodox in the region were forcibly expelled from their churches in the early 1990s. So there is much suffering all around.

Tensions in the old countries remain, but in North America the good relations between Orthodox and Catholics would come as stunning shock to Saint Alexis. There are now scores of examples of Orthodox and Catholic cooperation. For instance, a friend of mine is pastor of an Orthodox church in New Jersey. When his parish had to move from their premises to build a new church, none of the Orthodox churches in the area would give them temporary space to hold services, but a Roman Catholic community gave them the use of a chapel for three years at no charge. And the Sheptytsky Institute in Ottawa where I taught from 2003-2011 is a remarkable example of daily collaboration between Orthodox and Eastern Catholics.

As the North American experience shows, this climate of good relations sets before us a very different context for mission than the one faced by Saint Alexis. This climate of good also affects theological dialogue. It makes possible “the will to pardon” each other for the sins of the past.  The North-American Orthodox-Catholic dialogue said, 

We are all aware that the history of relations between our two churches often has been a tragic one, filled with persecutions and sufferings, but we must not remain prisoners of this past.

There are times when fighting for the faith is demanded. But all too often fighting can become a way of life that spills over into internal quarreling. Saint Alexis saw this as he looked around at the churches he had led into Orthodoxy. He said, “Respect your spiritual father! Look at the English, the Germans and the Irish. They all respect highly their spiritual leaders, they do not have quarrels in their churches, they do not argue in God’s house, and they do not fight and take each other to court.”

Fighting as a way of life also distracts from “the one thing needful.”  In his article “How We Should Live in America,” Saint Alexis asks how can the Orthodox live in a country where people of so many different ethnic and faith backgrounds share a common civic life?  “Hold on to your faith and do not attack the faith of others, do not argue about the faith and religion in saloons. Each one’s faith teaching is dear to him, and everyone believes that his own faith will lead him to salvation, as you do.”

We can learn from Saint Alexis to be “defenders of Orthodoxy” when our faith is under threat. We can also learn from him that holding on to our faith does not mean we have to attack the faith of others.