Ivan Sleziuk

Ivan Sleziuk (also spelled Slezyuk) was born on 14 January 1896 in the village of Zhyvachiv, in the Tlumach district of eastern Galicia. At the time of his birth the region belonged to Austria-Hungary; after the First World War it formed part of the Second Polish Republic, and during and after the Second World War it was incorporated into the Soviet Union. He was raised in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which uses the Byzantine rite while remaining in communion with Rome. He received his priestly formation at the theological seminary in Stanislaviv (today Ivano-Frankivsk) and was ordained a priest in 1923 by Bishop Hryhoriy Khomyshyn, eparch of Stanislaviv. For more than twenty years he served as a diocesan parish priest in that eparchy, exercising ordinary pastoral care through the political upheavals of the interwar period and the successive Soviet and German occupations of western Ukraine.

In April 1945, as the Soviet authorities prepared to liquidate the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and force its faithful into the Russian Orthodox Church, Bishop Khomyshyn secretly consecrated Sleziuk as coadjutor bishop with the right of succession. The public hierarchy of the church was arrested that spring, and a state-sponsored gathering at Lviv in 1946 purported to dissolve the union with Rome. Sleziuk himself was arrested in June 1945 and sentenced to a long term of forced labor in the Gulag. He spent about a decade in the camps and was released in the mid-1950s, during the limited thaw that followed Stalin’s death. Returning to western Ukraine, he assumed clandestine leadership of the underground eparchy of Ivano-Frankivsk, secretly ordaining priests, administering the sacraments, and maintaining ecclesiastical structure while living under police surveillance.

He was arrested a second time in 1962 and again imprisoned. Released in 1968, he spent his remaining years in Ivano-Frankivsk, still watched by the KGB, yet he continued to govern the catacomb church and consecrated Sofron Dmyterko as a bishop in order to secure succession. He died in Ivano-Frankivsk on 2 December 1973. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church remained officially forbidden until the late 1980s.

On 27 June 2001, during his pastoral visit to Ukraine, Pope John Paul II beatified Ivan Sleziuk in Lviv together with a group of other Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops, priests, religious, and laypeople who had been killed or had endured long imprisonment for their fidelity to the Catholic Church under Soviet rule. He is venerated as a blessed martyr and confessor. His life is a principal example of the secret consecrations and underground ministry by which that church preserved valid sacraments and apostolic succession from the suppression of 1946 until its legal restoration.