TOTH, ALEXIS G

TOTH, ALEXIS G., priest, missionary (14 March 1853–7 May 1909). Born in Szepes (near Presov), he was educated at the Roman Catholic Seminary of Esztergom, the United Greek Seminary of Ungvar, and the University of Presov with a degree in theology. Ordained in 1878, he served various parishes, was chancellor, director of the United Greek Catholic Seminary in Presov, and professor of Canon Law and Church history, before being sent to the United States on 15 November 1889 as a “missioner” to Slavic and Carpatho-Russian immigrants. As the first resident pastor of the Uniate (q.v.) St. Mary’s parish in Minneapolis, he had a fateful-and mutually antagonistic-meeting with Bishop Joh n Ireland (an “Americanist”) on 19 December 1889, after which he actively sought to return his Ruthenian flock to the Orthodox Church. This was accomplished on 25 March 1891, when they were received by Bishop Vladimir (Sokolovsky) of San Francisco into the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, an act later confirmed by the Holy Synod of Russia. Fr. Toth, ever a missionary to the immigrants, continued his activities in 1892 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1902 in Mayfield, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, so that the return of Uniates to Orthodoxy in the United States became a movement rather than an isolated phenomenon, involving an estimated 30,000 people.