John Bukovsky

John Bukovsky SVD (* as Jan Bukowski January 18, 1924 in Cerová , Slovakia ; † December 18, 2010 in Techny , Illinois , USA ) was a Roman Catholic religious and diplomat of the Holy See .

Life

John Bukovsky joined the religious order of the Steyler Missionaries in Nitra . Due to political persecution in his home country, he moved to the United States in 1947 after studying philosophy and finished his studies in theology. On December 3, 1950 he received in Techny, the center of American Divine Word Missionaries in Chicago , the ordination . He was first in the priestly ministry and in 1952 also obtained a licentiate in theology from the Catholic University of Americain Washington. From 1952 to 1954 he was professor of scripture in the religious seminary in Techny; he was considered an expert on Greek and Hebrew translations. From 1954 to 1956 he studied exegesis at the Pontifical Biblical Institute . Until 1967 he worked in research and teaching in Techny. In 1967 he was appointed rector of the religious college in Techny and shortly afterwards to the general chapter of the order in Rome. From 1968 he was advisor to the Holy See in its relations with Czechoslovakia and from 1973 in the State Secretariat of the Vatican for relations with Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. He worked in particular with Agostino Casaroli and Luigi Poggi , who later became cardinals , and often accompanied them to Romania in the 1970s and other Eastern European countries that were then communist ruled.

On August 18, 1990 appointed him Pope John Paul II. To Titular Archbishop of Tabalta and apostolic nuncio in Romania . On 13 October 1990 he received from Cardinal Secretary of State Agostino Casaroli in St. Peter's Basilica , the episcopal ordination ; Co -consecrators were Casaroli's successor, Angelo Sodano , and Francesco Colasuonno , Apostolic Delegate in Russia. In Romania, after the fall of communism, he was mainly responsible for establishing diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Romania and securing the assets of the Greek Catholic Church .

In 1994, Bukovsky moved to Moscow as Apostolic Nuncio to the Russian Federation . Here he continued the steps Colasuonno had started to establish a Catholic church hierarchy in Russia and consecrated the bishops Jerzy Mazur and Clemens Pickel . He managed to reopen the seminary in Saint Petersburg .

The Pope accepted his age-related resignation with effect from January 29, 2000. Bukovsky first spent his retirement in Vienna, later in the center of his order in Techny, where he also died. He was buried on January 3, 2011 in Slovakia in the crypt of the Church of Our Lady on Calvary in Nitra.

In 2006 he published his autobiography "Spomienky spoločníka" in Slovak.

Publications

• Spomienky spoločníka , Nitra 2006, ISBN 978-80-85223-76-7
• Chiesa del martirio, chiesa della diplomazia: Memorie tra Cecoslovacchia e Vaticano , EDB, Bologna 2009, ISBN 978-88-10-14049-9

Web links

• Archbishop John Bukovsky, 1924–2010 ( memento from January 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), obituary on the homepage of the Steyler Missionaries (English), accessed on February 9, 2013
• Entry on John Bukovsky on catholic-hierarchy.org
• Biographical obituary of Fr. Jakub Błaszczyszyn SVD on ekai.pl (Polish)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Obituary by Vatican Radio from December 20, 2010 (Romanian)
2. ↑ Death report (Polish) ( Memento from September 13, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
3. ↑ Pripomenuli si prvé výročie smrti arcibiskupa Bukovského ( Slovak ) TK KBS . December 18, 2011. Retrieved January 28, 2013.

predecessor	Office	successor
Andrea Cassulo	Apostolic Nuncio in Romania 1990–1994	Janusz Bolonek
Francesco Colasuonno	Apostolic Nuncio to the Russian Federation 1994–2000	Georg Zur