Following the death of his wife and child a few years later, he served in local parishes, as diocesan chancellor, and as professor and director at the Greek Catholic seminary of Prešov.

Finding the church barely furnished and deeply in debt, he set about rectifying the situation, ultimately bringing the parish to a place of fiscal stability whilst never drawing a salary.

Correspondence and personal meetings with Bishop Vladimir Sokolovsky of San Francisco followed, culminating in Toth's decision to formally enter the Russian Orthodox Church in March 1892.

Toth was accompanied by 361 fellow Eastern Rite Catholics; thousands more would follow in the years to come, largely due to his own efforts to evangelize them toward this move.

This, combined with further demands by U.S. Latin bishops against Eastern Rite parishes facilitated the conversion of over 20,000 Eastern-rite Catholics to Russian Orthodoxy by the time Toth died in 1909.