Josyf Slipyj

Josyf Slipyj was born on 17 February 1892 in the village of Zazdrist in eastern Galicia, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied at the Greek Catholic Theological Seminary in Lviv and at the University of Innsbruck, where he completed a doctorate in theology. On 30 September 1917 he was ordained a priest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. He pursued further studies in Rome at the Pontifical Oriental Institute, the Pontifical Gregorian University, and the Angelicum, concentrating on Eastern Christian theology and patristics, and returned to Galicia as a scholar rather than as a member of a religious order.

In Lviv he taught in the seminary and in 1929 became rector of the newly founded Greek Catholic Theological Academy, which he helped build into a center of Ukrainian Catholic learning. As Soviet occupation made the Church’s future uncertain, Sheptytsky had him consecrated in secret on 22 December 1939 as coadjutor archbishop with right of succession. When Sheptytsky died on 1 November 1944, Slipyj succeeded him as Metropolitan of Halych and Archbishop of Lviv, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, just as the Red Army reoccupied western Ukraine.

In April 1945 the Soviet authorities arrested Slipyj together with the other Ukrainian Catholic bishops. He refused to accept the forced “reunion” with the Russian Orthodox Church that the regime staged at the Synod of Lviv in 1946, which purported to dissolve the Union of Brest. He spent eighteen years in prisons, labor camps, and internal exile, including the Siberian Gulag. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was driven underground; Slipyj remained its imprisoned metropolitan and would not apostatize.

Released in January 1963 after diplomatic efforts involving Pope John XXIII and Western governments, he was allowed to go to Rome. He took part in the later sessions of the Second Vatican Council, speaking for Eastern Catholics and for Christians under communist persecution. Pope Paul VI created him a cardinal in 1965 and confirmed him as Major Archbishop of Lviv of the Ukrainians. Slipyj used the title Patriarch of Kyiv-Halych and All Rus, in keeping with Kyivan historical claims; the Holy See never formally erected a Ukrainian Catholic patriarchate, and the disagreement remained unresolved. In Rome he founded St. Sophia’s Cathedral, a Ukrainian Catholic university, and other institutions for the diaspora and for a future restoration of the Church in Ukraine.

He died in Rome on 7 September 1984 and was first buried in St. Sophia’s Cathedral there. After the legalization of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and Ukrainian independence, his remains were transferred in 1992 to the crypt of St. George’s Cathedral in Lviv. He is remembered as the public face of that Church during its decades of suppression, as a theologian and educator, and as a symbol of resistance to Soviet religious persecution. He has not been beatified or canonized.