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.