Becoming What We Always Were: “Conversion” of U.S. Greek Catholics to Russian Orthodoxy, 1890–1914

The conversions of Greek Catholic migrants to Russian Orthodoxy in the U.S., as well as in Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Austria-Hungary in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries proliferated due to numerous intersecting causes. The most fundamental cause lay in the perception of “conversion” in terms of continuity, rather than transformation. Historians’ focus upon the conversion narrative of the foremost activist for the conversions in the U.S., Father Alexis Toth, has obscured the underlying causation for the phenomena of conversion. While Toth’s account of “Roman” Catholic prejudice prompting his conscious rejection of “the Unia” (Eastern Catholicism) in favor of Russian Orthodoxy does partially align with causation in the broader Eastern Europe and American movements, the narrative of conversion as dramatic transformation remains primarily a story about Toth. For many ordinary converts, a more central factor in their “conversions” lay in perceptions of continuity between their officially “Greek Catholic” religious practices which they (and, they believed, their ancestors) had always maintained, and their practices in newly-established Russian Orthodox convert parishes in the U.S. and throughout the Americas.