Alexander Chira

Alexander Chira was a bishop of the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church whose life ran from the last years of Austria-Hungary through the Czechoslovak and wartime Hungarian administrations of Transcarpathia and into the long Soviet campaign against the Greek Catholic Church. He was born on 17 January 1897 in the village of Vilkhivtsi (Hungarian: Ilosva) in Máramaros County of the Kingdom of Hungary, then part of Austria-Hungary and now in Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukraine. He belonged to the local Ruthenian Byzantine-rite Catholic community. He studied at the Greek Catholic Theological Seminary in Uzhhorod and continued theological formation in Budapest. On 19 December 1920 he was ordained a priest of the Eparchy of Mukachevo by Bishop Antal Papp.

In the interwar period, when Transcarpathia formed part of Czechoslovakia, Chira combined parish work with teaching. He became a professor and later rector of the Uzhhorod seminary, helping to train clergy for the eparchy. During the Second World War the region passed under Hungarian then Soviet control. After the Red Army entered Transcarpathia, Bishop Theodore Romzha, seeking to preserve apostolic succession as persecution loomed, secretly consecrated Chira auxiliary bishop of Mukachevo on 30 December 1944, with authorization from Rome. Romzha was fatally poisoned by Soviet agents in 1947. The authorities then liquidated the Greek Catholic Church in Transcarpathia, as they had already done in Galicia, and pressed clergy to enter the Russian Orthodox Church.

Chira refused to break communion with Rome. He was arrested in 1949 and sentenced to a long term in the Gulag. After imprisonment he was released only to face further detention and restrictions, and was finally consigned to internal exile in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. He settled in Karaganda, a centre of deportation for Volga Germans, Poles, and other Catholics. There, under police surveillance, he exercised a clandestine and later more open episcopal ministry among Latin-rite and Eastern-rite faithful who had almost no remaining clergy.

In Karaganda he became a principal figure in the survival of Catholic life in Soviet Central Asia, celebrating the sacraments, instructing the faithful, and encouraging vocations in poverty and isolation. He remained there until his death on 26 May 1983 and was buried in the city. He has not been formally beatified or canonized. Among Greek Catholics and among the Catholics of Kazakhstan he is remembered as a confessor who kept the faith through camps and exile, and whose career shows both the destruction of the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church in its homeland and its unexpected continuation in the Soviet east.