Five Churchmen from Ukraine recognized during Pope John Paul II's visit to Kazakstan (10/07/01)

Five Churchmen from Ukraine recognized during Pope John Paul II's visit to Kazakstan

Religious Information Service of Ukraine

LVIV - During his trip to Kazakstan on September 22-25, Pope John Paul II recognized five Catholics born in Ukraine as being among the victims of totalitarianism who suffered for their faith.

One, Bishop Oleksander Khyra, was a Greek-Catholic from Mukachiv, located in the far southwest corner of Ukraine. The four others were Roman Catholic priests from western and central Ukraine.

Bishop Khyra was born in 1897. After studies in Rome he was ordained in 1920. For almost 20 years he was professor and then rector of the Greek-Catholic seminary in Uzhorod.

After Stalin's liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in the 1940s, Father Khyra was secretly consecrated as bishop by Blessed Teodor Romzha, who was beatified this June during the papal visit to Ukraine.

In 1949 Bishop Khyra was arrested and sentenced to 25 years of servitude but was released from the camps in 1956 with the condition that he was forbidden to return to Ukraine.

After his prison term he continued his ministry in Karaganda, Kazakstan, and occasionally made illegal trips back to his home eparchy, where he ordained priests and bishops. All the faithful approached him simply as a priest because no one knew about his episcopal ordination.

Bishop Josef Werth SJ, the current Roman Catholic apostolic administrator of Novosibirsk, received his sacraments from the hands of exiled Bishop Khyra in the secrecy of the underground Church in Karaganda.

The young Father Werth did not even know the Latin mass until he was a teenager, since the only priest serving the German exiles in that city was Bishop Khyra, who for several years celebrated Byzantine Rite services in parishioners' homes in the German suburb of Maikutok.

On June 29,1980, Bishop Khyra consecrated a church in Karaganda; he died there on May 26, 1983.

The four Roman Catholic clergymen recognized by the pope were: Fathers Tomas Gumberger, Josyp Kuczinski, Bronislaw Dziepetski, Wladislaw Bukowinski and Aloizy Kaszuba.

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