Alexis Toth of Wilkes-⁠Barre

Saint Alexis Toth of Wilkes-⁠Barre was a Ruthenian priest born in Slovakia, who became a protopresbyter and Orthodox missionary in the United States and fell asleep at Wilkes-⁠Barre in 1909. Through his work about twenty thousand Greek Catholics were received into the Russian Orthodox Church, which helped the growth of Orthodoxy in America and the formation of the Orthodox Church in America. He was glorified in 1994. He is commemorated on 7 May.

He was born on 14 March 1853 into a Rusyn family of a Greek Catholic priest, George Tovt, and his wife Cecilia, near Prešov, now in Slovakia, then in the Austro-⁠Hungarian Empire. His birthplace is said to be the village of Kobylnice. His brother also became a Greek Catholic priest, and his uncle Nicholas Tovt was the Greek Catholic bishop of Prešov. He went to primary school, then the gymnasium at Prešov, did military service, studied one year at a Roman Catholic seminary, then at the Greek Catholic seminary in Uzhhorod and the faculty of theology, and knew Rusyn, Hungarian, Russian, German, Latin and some Greek. He married Rosalie Mihalics, a priest's daughter, in 1878 and was ordained in the same year by his uncle. After the death of his wife and child he became the bishop's secretary, then rector of the seminary and professor of canon law and church history at Prešov.

In 1889, at the request of the Greek Catholic parish of Saint Mary in Minneapolis, he was sent to the United States, arriving on 15 November. The church was barely furnished and deeply in debt, and he put it on its feet without drawing a salary. As there was no Greek Catholic bishop in America, he paid a visit, as was customary, to the local Latin bishop, Archbishop John Ireland, an advocate of the "Americanization" of immigrants, who did not accept ethnic parishes. According to Toth, Ireland grew angry, threw his credentials onto the table, did not consider him and his bishop truly Catholic, and forbade him to serve in Minneapolis. His letters to his bishop in Hungary went unanswered, and he came to believe that he and other Greek Catholic priests would be recalled to Europe.

In December 1890 he and other priests contacted the Russian consul in San Francisco and then Bishop Vladimir Sokolovsky, and in March 1892 Toth formally entered the Russian Orthodox Church with 361 Greek Catholic faithful, thousands more following in later years, largely through his efforts of preaching to them. The Orthodox Church in America says that by 1916 the Latin Church had lost 163 parishes of the Eastern rite. He also served at Wilkes-⁠Barre and died there on 7 May 1909. He was glorified by the Orthodox Church in America in 1994. He is honoured as a confessor and defender of Orthodoxy in North America, and the Lviv diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church also remembers him in the Synaxis of the Saints of Galicia.