Nykyta Budka

Nykyta Budka was born on 7 September 1877 in the village of Dobromirka in Zbarazh county, Galicia, then a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in western Ukraine. He received his theological formation at the Greek Catholic seminary in Lviv and at the University of Innsbruck, where he completed a doctorate in theology. Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky ordained him to the priesthood on 25 October 1905. In the years that followed he served as prefect of the Lviv seminary and became closely associated with the pastoral care of Ukrainian emigrants leaving Galicia for the Americas and other destinations, work that drew the attention of church authorities and of the Holy See.

In 1912 Pope Pius X appointed him the first bishop for Ukrainian Greek Catholics in Canada, establishing an apostolic exarchate for the large immigrant population that had settled chiefly on the Canadian prairies. Budka was consecrated bishop in Lviv on 14 October 1912 and arrived in Canada later that year. Over the next decade and a half he worked to organize parishes, promote Catholic schooling, and stabilize church life among a scattered and often impoverished flock, while navigating disputes over rite, the status of married clergy, and relations with the Latin hierarchy. He resigned the Canadian see in 1927 and returned to Galicia.

In Lviv he was appointed vicar general of the archeparchy and assisted Metropolitan Sheptytsky. After the Soviet occupation of western Ukraine, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was subjected to a systematic campaign of suppression intended to force its absorption into the Russian Orthodox Church. On 11 April 1945 Budka was arrested by Soviet security organs together with the other Catholic bishops of the region. He was convicted and deported to the Gulag.

He died on 1 October 1949 in a labor camp in the Karaganda region of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Pope John Paul II beatified him as a martyr on 27 June 2001 in Lviv, together with other bishops, clergy, religious, and lay faithful of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church who had died under Soviet persecution. He is venerated among the blessed martyrs of that church, especially in Ukraine and in the Ukrainian Catholic diaspora in Canada.