Levkadija Harasymiv

Levkadija Harasymiv, known in religion as Sister Lavrentia (also spelled Laurentia or Lavrentia Herasymiv), was a Ukrainian Greek Catholic nun venerated as a blessed martyr. She was born on 30 September 1911 in the village of Rudnyky in eastern Galicia, then a province of Austria-Hungary and now in Lviv Oblast, Ukraine. The Ukrainian Catholic population of Galicia kept the Byzantine rite in communion with Rome, and women’s congregations had grown there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1931 she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, which served Ukrainian Catholic communities through teaching, care of the sick, and parish work. She made her vows in 1933 and received the name Lavrentia.

Her convent life unfolded through the political shocks that struck western Ukraine: the end of Austrian rule, the interwar Polish Republic, Soviet occupation in 1939, German occupation during the Second World War, and the return of Soviet power in 1944. After the war the Soviet state set out to liquidate the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The 1946 Council of Lviv, held under NKVD pressure and without a free Catholic hierarchy, purported to break the union with Rome and fold the church into the Moscow Patriarchate. Bishops, priests, and religious who refused were imprisoned, deported, or driven underground, and houses of the Sisters of Saint Joseph were closed. Sister Lavrentia, like many of her sisters, tried to continue a religious life without public institutional support.

In 1950 Soviet security organs arrested her together with Sister Olympia Bida of the same congregation. They were charged in connection with illegal religious activity. After detention they were deported to Siberia and assigned to a special settlement at Kharsk in Tomsk Oblast, in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Such exile combined forced residence, surveillance, and often heavy labor in a severe climate. Sister Lavrentia suffered from tuberculosis, which was common in camps and exile sites. She died at Kharsk on 28 August 1952. Little contemporary detail survives of her last months; she is known to have remained a professed religious until death.

Pope John Paul II beatified her on 27 June 2001 in Lviv, during the first papal visit to independent Ukraine. She was included among a group of Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops, clergy, religious, and laity recognized as martyrs of communist persecution and commemorated together on 27 June. She has not been canonized. She left no substantial writings, and published sources say little about her inner life beyond her profession, arrest, exile, and death. Her cult rests on her witness as a woman religious who died in Siberian exile rather than abandon the banned Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.