Vasyl Velytschkowskyj

Wassyl Velytschkowskyj CSsR ( Ukrainian Василь Величковський , Polish Wasyl Wełyczkowski , English Vasyl Velychkovsky ; born June 1, 1903 in Stanislau , Galicia ; † June 30, 1973 in Winnipeg , Canada ) was a Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishop . He was proclaimed a martyr and blessed by Pope John Paul II in 2001 .

Life

Vasyl Velytschkowskyj was born into a family in which the vocations to the priesthood had a long tradition. His parents Wolodymyr and Anna Welytschkowskyj raised their children according to a Christian understanding, so it was almost logical that the boy wanted to become a priest at an early age . He attended high school in Horodenka and developed into a patriot . At the age of fifteen, he joined the Galician Ukrainian army one to the independence of Ukraine after the First World War to defend. He was discharged from the armed forces in 1920 and began his priestly training.

Vasyl Velytschkowskyj began as a seminarian in the seminary of the Lviv Archeparchy . The Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky ordained him in 1924 to the deacon , it was followed by the entry into the Congregation of the Redemptorists . On October 9, 1925, he was ordained a religious priest of the Redemptorists. In November 1928 he was sent to the Kovel mission station , where his difficult missionary work began. He saw how many Christians converted from the Greek Catholic to the Russian Orthodox faith under pressure from the Soviet government . Nevertheless, with financial support from Lviv , he managed to build some chapels and churches . In 1935 he was appointed abbot of the Stanisławów Monastery , where he witnessed the invasion of German troops and the withdrawal of the Soviets after the start of the war in 1939, then the withdrawal of the Wehrmacht and the Soviet seizure of power in western Ukraine . His new place of work was Volhynia , after which he became abbot of the Redemptorist monastery in Ternopil in 1942 . In 1959 he was appointed titular bishop and on February 4, 1963 he was ordained a "secret bishop" by Jossyf Slipyj , the archbishop of Lemberg. Bishop Welytschkowskyj consecrated Julian Woronowskyj bishop and was Mitkonsekrator at Volodymyr Sterniuk CSsR.

Martyrdom and Beatification

On the night of April 10-11, 1945, the Russian secret service arrested almost the entire episcopate of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. Velychkowskyj, then abbot in Ternopil, was arrested in 1945 by the NKVD secret service for anti-Soviet propaganda and imprisoned in a prison in Kiev . In exchange for switching to the Russian Orthodox Church, he was offered freedom. He categorically refused this offer. He was then sentenced to the death penalty , which was then commuted to a 10-year prison term with forced labor . From 1945 to 1947 he was imprisoned in a prison camp near Kirov , then he was transferred to the Vorkuta labor camp and had to work in the mine . He tried hard to read Holy Mass every day , using tin vessels as a sacred device . He was sent to the camp hospital a few months before his release before he was released on July 9, 1955. On January 2, 1969, he was again imprisoned for three years for his religious activities in Kommunarsk ( Donets Basin ). In 1972, released on January 27th, he was sent to Yugoslavia to convalesce and was not allowed to return to Lviv. He lived in Zagreb for a short time and then stayed in Rome . Then he accepted Maxim Hermaniuk's invitation to Winnipeg and arrived in Canada in bad health. He died on June 30, 1973. When, after almost thirty years, they wanted to raise their bones for reburial, it was discovered that his body was hardly damaged. Some relics were prepared, the main part of the body shell is kept in a reliquary in the St. Joseph Cathedral Winnipeg. The beatification process was completed on March 2, 2001, Pope John Paul II signed the final document of the beatification on April 24, 2001 and announced the elevation to the martyr and blessed on June 27, 2001.

See also

• Twenty-five Blessed of the Greek Catholic Church of Ukrainians

Web links

• The Redemptorists - Blessed Vasyl Velychkovskyi (English)
• Entry on Wassyl Velytschkowskyj on catholic-hierarchy.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Church under the dictatorship in Ukraine: "In this desperate situation, underground bishops were consecrated for the Greek Catholic Church, who ensured the survival of the church until the fall of the regime" [1]
2. ↑ The " raising of the bones " (Elevatio) is carried out on the occasion of the canonization process of martyrs before a solemn transfer ( Translatio ) [2]
3. ↑ Bishop Velychkovsky Martyr's Shrine