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Biography

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Klymentiy Sheptytsky was born Kazimierz Maria Szeptycki on 17 November 1869 in the village of Prylbychi in Galicia, then a crown land of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He came from the Szeptycki family, an old noble lineage with both Polish and Ukrainian branches that had historically supported the Greek Catholic Church. His parents were Count Jan Kanty Szeptycki and Countess Zofia Fredro. Among his siblings was Roman Aleksander Maria Szeptycki, who later took the monastic name Andrey and served for decades as Metropolitan of Lviv and head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Kazimierz received a classical education and went on to study law, attending universities in Kraków, Munich, and Paris. He completed a doctorate in law and returned to Galicia to manage family properties and participate in public life.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he served as a member of the Austrian parliament, representing Galician interests. Despite this worldly career, he experienced a call to religious life. In 1911 he entered the Studite monastery that his brother the metropolitan had helped restore at Univ Lavra, adopting the name Klymentiy. The Studites followed a rigorous Eastern Christian monastic tradition modeled on the ancient Monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople. Klymentiy was ordained a priest in 1915. Over the following years he rose to become archimandrite, the superior of the Studite congregation, and worked to strengthen monastic discipline, education, and the Byzantine liturgical heritage within the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

During the German occupation of Ukraine in the Second World War, Archimandrite Klymentiy and the Studite monks took part in efforts to rescue Jews from Nazi persecution. They issued baptismal certificates and hid individuals, actions for which Klymentiy was posthumously honored by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. After Soviet forces reoccupied western Ukraine, the Stalinist regime set out to destroy the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, arresting its hierarchy and forcing a synod of 1946 that purported to dissolve the church and merge it with the Russian Orthodox Church. Klymentiy rejected this union. He was arrested in 1947, interrogated, and eventually transferred to Vladimir prison in Russia.

There, under the harsh conditions of the Soviet penal system, he died on 1 May 1951. His body was not returned to his family or community, and the precise location of his burial remains unknown. Following the legalization of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the late 1980s and the independence of Ukraine, the causes of the church’s twentieth-century martyrs were introduced in Rome. On 27 June 2001 Pope John Paul II beatified Klymentiy Sheptytsky in Lviv together with a group of other bishops, priests, and religious who had suffered under Soviet rule. He is honored as a blessed hieromartyr in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and among Eastern Catholics.

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