Differing political views part of parish development in Northeast Minneapolis

On August 17, 1913, Ukrainian Catholics gathered in northeast Minneapolis to celebrate. After two weeks of delays due to sick priests, Archbishop John Ireland had finally arrived to bless the cornerstone of St. Constantine Catholic Church at Sixth and University avenues. After the formal event, the priests retired to the rectory and the parishioners gathered at a local cultural hall for festivities.

Although the parish was formally part of Archbishop Ireland’s archdiocese at the time, it would soon be under the leadership of the man who stood next to him. The pope had recently appointed Bishop Soter Ortynsky as the leader of Ruthenian Greek Catholics in America. Ruthenians, also known as Rusyns, are a Slavic ethnic group from the Carpathian Mountains on the border of Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine. A primary feature of their culture is their Eastern Catholic religion.

These Catholics acknowledge the primacy of the pope, but their Mass is much more like Orthodox religious rites. They also allow married priests. Bishops from across America had trouble accommodating this deviation from the Roman Catholic standard. Archbishop Ireland was not an exception.

The archbishop’s first run-in with the Ruthenians came in 1889. Father Alexis Toth, who was serving as a priest without official permission and as pastor of St. Mary’s parish (at Fifth Street and Seventh Avenue in northeast Minneapolis), had been ordained and taught theology in what is now Slovakia. After coming to Minnesota, he visited Archbishop Ireland to gain his permission to minister as a priest in his archdiocese. Their conversation did not go well.

Father Toth explained that he had been married and widowed before immigrating to America, and Archbishop Ireland believed this made him unfit to be a priest. The archbishop also preferred that new immigrants integrate themselves into the American church. He refused Father Toth’s request. Father Toth contemplated his options for two years, but ultimately, he and most of his parishioners decided to become an Eastern Orthodox parish instead. Father Toth was eventually named a saint in the Eastern Orthodox church for helping 20,000 Eastern Catholics across America convert to Orthodoxy.

Not all of the Ruthenians were happy with Father Toth’s solution, so in 1902, these families and newer immigrants from the region formed the St. John the Baptist Society in Minneapolis, which would seed a new parish by the same name in 1908. This time, Archbishop Ireland complied. It quickly became clear that the parishioners did not all get along, and a divide developed between people with slightly different origins. While they all worshiped using the same liturgical traditions, their political views were different, with Eastern groups identifying more with the fight for a new Ukrainian nation. This group formed St. Constantine.

This mirrored a national divide that formed a few years later when the church split into two branches. The eastern sector became the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and the more westerly group became the Byzantine Catholic Church. Today, these churches still bear these names and remain fully in communion with the Roman Catholic Church but under different direct leadership.

Despite their differences, these parish churches (and their Polish neighbor, Holy Cross) were designed by the same architect. Born in Kraków, Victor Cordella studied architecture in Lviv. After immigrating to America, one of his specialties became designing churches for Eastern European immigrants that echoed the styles of their homeland. As a result of ethnic divisions and Cordella’s work, northeast Minneapolis is a neighborhood of ornate churches, many of which reflect the native lands of the people who founded them.

Luiken is a Catholic and a historian with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. She loves exploring and sharing the hidden treasures that touch our lives every day.