St Alexis Toth was a priest from the Carpathian Mountains who came to America to serve immigrants from his homeland. His decision to return to Orthodoxy in 1892 led tens of thousands of Carpatho-Russian and Galician immigrants to follow him, and it changed the shape of the Orthodox Church in America.

A Greek Catholic priest

Alexis Toth was born on 14 March 1853 in the village of Kobylnice, in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary and is now eastern Slovakia. He was ordained in 1878 as a priest of the Greek Catholic Church, the Eastern-rite Church in communion with Rome, and taught at the seminary in Prešov.

Minneapolis, 1889

In 1889 he was sent to America to serve St Mary's Greek Catholic parish in Minneapolis. There the local Roman Catholic archbishop, John Ireland, refused to recognise him, in part because he was a widower priest of the Eastern rite. Rejected by the local hierarchy, Toth and his parishioners turned to the Russian Orthodox bishop in San Francisco, Vladimir. In March 1892 he and 361 of his parishioners were received into the Orthodox Church.

Wilkes-Barre and the return to Orthodoxy

Toth spent the rest of his life travelling among the Carpatho-Russian communities of Pennsylvania and the northeast, explaining the history of their Church and inviting them to return to the Orthodox faith of their ancestors. He served as a priest in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. By the time of his death on 7 May 1909, more than twenty thousand Eastern Catholics had become Orthodox, and many of the parishes he helped found remain part of the Orthodox Church in America today.

Glorification

The Orthodox Church in America glorified him on 29 May 1994 as St Alexis of Wilkes-Barre. He is honoured with a shrine at St Tikhon's Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. His feast is kept on 7 May.

In icons

St Alexis is depicted as a priest in vestments, usually holding a cross or the Gospel, sometimes with a scroll. In icons of the saints of North America he often stands near St Tikhon, who led the diocese during the years of Alexis's ministry, and St Raphael of Brooklyn.