Andrey Sheptytsky

He was born as Count Roman Aleksander Maria Szeptycki in a village 40 km west/northwest of Lviv called Prylbychi, in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then a crownland of the Austrian Empire.[5] His parents were Jan Kanty Szeptycki and Zofia née Fredro.[5]

The Szeptycki family descends from the Ruthenian nobility, but in the 18th century had become Polish-speaking and Catholic. The maternal Fredro family descends from the Polish nobility.The Szeptycki family produced a number of bishops of both Catholic rites, most notably in the 18th century. Greek Catholic Bishops of Lviv and Metropolitans of Kiev were: Athanasius and Leo, Barlaam Bazyli was also bishop of Lviv. Atanazy Andrzej was a Greek Catholic bishop of Przemyśl and Nikifor was archimanrite of Lavriv. The Latin Catholic Bishop of Płock was Hieronim Antoni Szeptycki, while his nephew Marcin was elected to the position, but did not take it. His maternal grandfather was the Polish writer Aleksander Fredro. One of his brothers, Klymentiy Sheptytsky, M.S.U., became a Studite monk, and another, Stanisław Szeptycki, became a General in the Polish Army. He was 2 m 10 cm (6 ft. 10 in.) tall.

Sheptytsky was baptized in the Roman rite at the parish church in Bruchnal (today Ternovitsa).[5] Sheptytsky received his education first at home and then in Lviv and later in Kraków.[5] His confessor was Jesuit Henry Nostitz-Jackowski, who was carrying out the reform of the Greek Catholic Basilian Order in Galicia. Probably under his influence, Sheptyskiy made the decision to join the Basilians, which, however, provoked opposition from his father.[5] Hence in 1883 he went to serve in the Austro-Hungarian Army but after a few months he fell sick and was forced to abandon it.[5]

Instead, he went to study law in Breslau. There he was a member of the Literary and Slavic Society run by Władysław Nehring, as well as the Upper Silesian Society and the Polish Academicians' Reading Room.[5] With his brother Alexander, he founded the Polish-Catholic Student Theological Society "Societas Hosiana" in 1884.[5] From the 1885/6 academic year, he continued his studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, at which time he changed his nationality declaration from "Polish" to "Ruthenian".[5] In April and May 1886 he visited Rome. From November to December 1887 he stayed in Kyiv and then in Moscow.[5] Together with mother and brother Leone he was granted an audience on March 24, 1888, with Pope Leo XIII at the Vatican. Pope blessed his intention to join Basilians.[5] On May 19, 1888 he received doctorate.[5]

According to his biographer Fr. Cyril Korolevsky, Sheptytsky's lifelong dream of creating the Russian Greek Catholic Church as a means of reuniting the Russian people with the Holy See goes back at least to his first trip to Russia in 1887. Afterwards, Sheptytsky "wrote some reflections" between October and November 1887, and expressed his belief, "that the Great Schism, which became definitive in Russia in the fifteenth century, was a bad tree, and it was useless to keep cutting the branches without uprooting the trunk itself, because the branches would always grow back."[6]

Sheptytsky became a novice at the Basilian monastery in Dobromyl on June 2, 1888. He took the name, Andrew, after the younger brother of Saint Peter, Andrew the Apostle, considered the founder of the Byzantine Church and also specifically of the Ukrainian Church. Beginning in 1889, he studied Ukrainian there under Wojciech Baudiss.[5] He then studied at the Jesuit College in Kraków, passing the exam in 1894.[5] On September 3, 1892 he was ordained a priest in Przemyśl.[5] He was made hegumen of the Monastery of St Onuphrius in Lviv in 1896. In 1898, he took up the post of professor of moral and dogmatic theology at the Basilian seminary in Krystynopol. There he founded the Studite Order, based on the rule of St. Theodore the Studite.[5]

Memorial plaque in Kraków, marking the place where Szeptycki lived

In 1899, following the death of Cardinal Sylwester Sembratowicz, Sheptytsky was nominated by Emperor Franz Joseph to fill the vacant position of Greek Catholic Bishop of Stanyslaviv[7] (now Ivano-Frankivsk), and Pope Leo XIII concurred. Thus he was consecrated as bishop in Lviv on 17 September 1899 by Metropolitan Julian Sas-Kuilovsky assisted by Bishop Chekhovych and Bishop Weber, the Latin-Rite auxiliary of Lviv.[8] On February 5 of that year, he received a doctorate in theological sciences in Rome, nostrified at the Faculty of Theology of the Jagiellonian University.[5] A year later, following the death of Julian Sas-Kuilovsky, Sheptytsky was appointed, at the age of thirty-six, Metropolitan of Halych, Archbishop of Lviv and Bishop of Kamenets-Podolsk; he was enthroned on 17 January 1901.[9][5] From February 1901, he sat with the House of Lords of the Imperial Council in Vienna with the title of secret counselor. He also became deputy speaker of the Galician Diet, a position he held until 1912.[5]

He was active in promoting the revival and expansion of the Eastern Catholic Churches in the territory of Russian Empire, visiting incognito that country several times and secretly ordaining bishops and priests there. He also took an active part in the Velehrad congresses. He also strove for the revival of the Belarusian Greek Catholic Church, and to this end contacted important leaders of the movement for Belarusian nationalism, including Ivan Lutskevich.[5]

Sheptytsky supported the Ukrainian national movement, founding a Greek Catholic seminary in Stanislaviv, supported the opening of a Ukrainian gymnasium there, and a Ukrainian university and hospital in Lviv.[5] He sponsored an exhibition of Ukrainian artists in Lviv in 1905, led a Ukrainian pilgrimage to Palestine, and led a Ukrainian delegation to Emperor Franz Joseph seeking reform of the electoral law.[5] At the same time, he sought to prevent Polish-Ukrainian nationalist conflicts in Galicia. In 1904, he issued a pastoral letter to Polish Greek Catholics, urging them to love their own nation and warning against harming others under the guise of patriotism.[5] In 1908, he harshly condemned the assassination of Galician governor Andrzej Potocki by Ukrainian student Myroslav Sichinsky.[5]

Sheptytsky visited North America in 1910 where he met with Ukrainian Greek Catholic immigrant communities in the United States; attended the twenty-first International Eucharistic Congress in Montreal; toured Ukrainian communities in Canada; and invited the Redemptorist fathers ministering in the Byzantine rite to come to Ukraine.

After the outbreak of World War I, Sheptytsky proposed eventual creation of the Ukrainian state out of the Russian territories, he also appealed believers to stay loyal to the emperor of Austria.[5] When Russians entered Lviv Sheptytsky was arrested on September 18, 1914 and sent to Kyiv. While being there he tried to recreate union by consecrating Yosif Botsyan as bishop of Lutsk.[5] For this activity, he was deported to Nizhny Novgorod, then Kursk, after that to monastery of Saint Euthymius in Suzdal and finally to Yaroslav.[10][5] He was released in 1918 and returned to Lviv from the Russian Empire. Bolsheviks destroyed his parents' rural house in Prylbychi where he was born.[10] During the destruction the family archives were lost.[10]

After the German invasion of Poland, Sheptytsky issued a pastoral letter appealing not to succumb to propaganda. On October 9, 1939, after the Soviets occupied eastern Poland, without the consent of the Holy See, he created a new territorial division of the Greek Catholic Church on the territory of the USSR.[5] During the Soviet occupation, he tried to protect the independence of the Church in its contacts with the Soviet authorities. He protested the atheization of youth, organized synods and secretly ordained bishops. He also contacted the Polish underground (ZWZ) to ease Polish-Ukrainian relations.[5]

Sheptytsky welcomed the German army entering Lviv and supported the OUN-B's declaration of Ukrainian independence on June 30, 1941. After the dissolution of Yaroslav Stetsko's government, he became honorary chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Seniors. On July 22, 1941, in a letter to Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany's foreign minister, he protested against the annexation of Eastern Galicia to the General Government.[5] In August 1941, he assumed the protectorate of the newly established Ukrainian Red Cross. Gradually, he developed a dislike for the Germans, being disgusted by their policies toward the civilian population. In June 1942, he promulgated the document The Ideal of Our National Life, in which he presented a vision of an independent, united Ukraine united by a single Church in union with the Holy See.[5] In February 1942, he signed a letter to Adolf Hitler issued by the OUN-M opposing German policies and demanding the establishment of a free Ukraine. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1943, Sheptytsky appointed chaplains for the forming Ukrainian SS-Galizien division.[5]

Also in Ferbruary 1942 Sheptytsky sent a letter to Heinrich Himmler protesting the murder of Jews.[5] During World War II he harbored about 150-200 Jews, mainly children, in Greek Catholic monasteries, he collaborated in this work with the superiors of the Studite orders, Sister Josefa (Helena Witter) and his brother Klemens Szeptycki.[11][5] At his archbishop's residence in Lviv, he gave shelter to Kurt Lewin, the son of Jecheskiel Lewin, the chief rabbi of the Lviv progressive synagogue.[5]

In August 1942, Sheptytsky sent a letter to Pius XII in which he reported on the brutal Nazi policies and unequivocally condemned the murder of Jews, and also admitted that his original assessment of the Germans' attitude toward Ukrainians was wrong.[5] He also issued on November 21, 1942, the pastoral letter, "Thou Shalt Not Kill",[12] to protest Nazi atrocities. Alone among the church leaders in Nazi-occupied Europe, Sheptytsky openly spoke in defense of the persecuted Jews. One of the rabbis whose life was saved by Metropolitan Sheptytsky, David Kahane, stated: "Andrew Sheptytsky deserves the undying gratitude of the Jews and the honorific title 'Prince of the Righteous'".[13] In addition, among the Jews who, thanks to Sheptytsky's help, survived the war were Lili Pohlmann and her mother, Adam Daniel Rotfeld (later Poland's foreign minister), two sons of the chief rabbi of Katowice (including the prominent cardiac surgeon Leon Chameides).[14]

Sheptytsky maintained contacts with the Polish underground and tried to mediate in the Polish-Ukrainian conflict. In the autumn of 1941, he met with Jerzy Braun, an envoy of Government Delegate for Poland Cyryl Ratajski and General Stefan Rowecki, Commander-in-Chief of the ZWZ, to whom he made a proposal to delegate two Ukrainian representatives to the National Council in London.[5] Sheptytsky was aware of the ongoing genocide of the Polish population organized by the forces of OUN-B and the UPA since the summer of 1943. He did not condemn it outright, but in a pastoral letter of August 10, 1943, he called for saving the lives of those in danger, and in another of August 31, he urged both sides to stop fighting. In early 1944, he condemned the killings and their perpetrators, regardless of their motives. In a "word for Easter" dated April 16, 1944, he called for harmony between neighbors.[5]

During this period he secretly consecrated Josyf Slipyj as his successor. Sheptytsky died in 1944 and is buried in St. George's Cathedral in Lviv. In 1958 the cause for his canonization was begun, but stalled at the behest of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. Pope Francis approved his life as being one of heroic virtue on 16 July 2015, thus proclaiming him to be Venerable.