Vasyl Velychkovsky

Life and Ministry

Vasyl Velychkovsky was born at Stanislaviv in Austrian Galicia in AD 1903 to a family of Ukrainian Greek-Catholic priests, ordained in AD 1925, entered the Redemptorist congregation, and was assigned to itinerant parish missions throughout the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic dioceses of Galicia and Volhynia. After the Soviet liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church at the Lviv pseudo-synod of March AD 1946, he refused to accept the forced reunion with the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate, was arrested by the NKVD in July AD 1945, and spent the next ten years in the Gulag camps of Vorkuta and Kazakhstan. Released in AD 1955, he was secretly consecrated bishop by Metropolitan Iosyf Slipyj in a hotel room at Moscow in February AD 1963 to maintain the apostolic succession of the underground Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, and served as its clandestine head in the western Ukrainian SSR.

Circumstances of Death

Velychkovsky was rearrested in January AD 1969 for celebrating the divine liturgy and instructing seminarians; he was held at the Vladimir prison near Moscow for three years, during which his health was systematically destroyed by repeated injections of an unidentified substance that the Soviet medical staff administered weekly. He was paroled to Western emigration in January AD 1972 — at the urging of the Vatican and the Canadian Ukrainian-Catholic episcopate — and arrived at Winnipeg in February. Medical examination on his arrival showed advanced damage to his internal organs consistent with chemical poisoning. He served the Winnipeg Ukrainian Catholic congregation for sixteen months before dying on 30 June AD 1973 of the cumulative effects of the prison treatment. He was treated by the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church as a martyr of the Soviet persecution.

Legacy

Vasyl Velychkovsky was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 27 June AD 2001 at Lviv among the Twenty-Five Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Martyrs of the Soviet Persecution. His incorrupt body is venerated at the Saint Joseph's Ukrainian Catholic Church at Winnipeg, where his shrine receives pilgrims from across the Ukrainian Catholic diaspora. His witness is that the underground bishop dies of the prison even after his release: the chemicals administered in Vladimir did their work in Winnipeg, but the bishop who had maintained the apostolic succession in a Moscow hotel room had finished his work first. The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in Ukraine, restored after AD 1989, traces its survival through bishops like him.