This year marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of the great Ukrainian leader and great churchman Patriarch Josyf Slipyj, who strove to secure the Ukrainian nation’s rights and freedoms, and was imprisoned by Soviet authorities for refusing to betray the Ukrainian Catholic Church. He was, as St. Pope John Paul II said, a man “who had suffered hardships not unlike those of Christ at Golgotha.”
He was born in Zazdrist, in the western Ukrainian region of Ternopil (then under Austro-Hungarian rule), on February 17, 1892, and was ordained in 1917. In 1939, when western Ukraine came under Soviet occupation, he was secretly consecrated an archbishop by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky of Lviv, and he succeeded the metropolitan after his death in 1944. He was arrested by the Soviets on April 11, 1945. Soon after his arrest came the arrests of other bishops and clergy, followed in 1946 by the liquidation of the Ukrainian Catholic Church via a bogus “synod” that “rejoined” the Russian Orthodox Church.
Metropolitan Slipyj’s release from Soviet imprisonment was secured through the intervention of President John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII, and he arrived in Rome on February 9, 1963. In 1965 Pope Paul VI named Metropolitan Josyf a cardinal (notably, he had been appointed a cardinal earlier, in 1949, “in pectore” by Pope Pius XII). The cardinal resided in Rome for the last 21 years of his life and he worked tirelessly, establishing a Ukrainian Catholic seminary, building St. Sophia Sobor and founding the Ukrainian Catholic University of Pope St. Clement, which became the prototype for the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv that opened in 2002.
He began urging the Vatican to recognize a patriarchate and began to use the title of patriarch. “A patriarchate for the Ukrainian Catholic Church …is essential for the very existence of our Church because on its native territory this Church has been denied the right for legal existence. It has become the Church of the Catacombs. The faithful of this Church beyond the limits of Ukraine are scattered throughout the world as never before. …Without a unified administration to preserve the original identity of our Church, our Church will perish,” he argued.
Though the Vatican did not recognize the patriarchate, most Ukrainian Catholics considered Cardinal Slipyj their patriarch and referred to him as such. In 1973, at a liturgy in St. Peter’s Basilica during the Archepiscopal Synod, the title Patriarch Josyf I of Kyiv and Halych was officially used for the first time.
Patriarch Josyf died on September 7, 1984, at the age of 92. His funeral was attended by hundreds of mourners arriving from around the globe to pay their last respects. His earthly remains were transferred to Ukraine after the re-establishment of independence and buried at St. George Cathedral in Lviv.
Speaking at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv in 2012, Dr. Leonid Rudnytzky, a scholar who knew Patriarch Josyf well, said: “Divine providence gave to the capital of the Apostle Peter the Ukrainian Confessor of the Faith Josyf Slipyj, who came from the Siberian tundra, where he spent 18 years of exile and hard labor. He became ‘the conscience of the Vatican’ and began a new stage in the history of our Church.” Dr. Rudnytzky also underscored the role played by the patriarch in uniting Ukrainians around the globe: “Confessor of the Faith Josyf Slipyj became for Ukrainians, especially those of my generation, the embodiment of all the Christian virtues which were somewhat forgotten during the time of ‘prosperity and peace.’ He traveled to all the Ukrainian settlements in the world, strengthened our community, giving it a sense of unity, totality, and gave us, his young warriors, a sense of belonging to the great work and willingness to sacrificial work.”
During this 125th anniversary year of Patriarch Josyf’s birth, we recall his great works, we see the results of his legacy, and we remember his testament addressed to “my spiritual children” in which he urged: above all else, “love one another.”