Suggest an Edit — Roman Lysko

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Biography

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Roman Lysko was born on 14 August 1911 in Horodok, in eastern Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in Lviv Oblast, Ukraine. He belonged to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the principal Eastern Catholic church of the Byzantine rite in Galicia since the Union of Brest. After gymnasium studies he entered the Greek Catholic Theological Academy in Lviv, the chief seminary of the church under Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. On 28 August 1941, during the German occupation of the region, Sheptytsky ordained him to the priesthood.

Eastern Catholic discipline allowed men who were not monks to marry before ordination, and church biographies prepared for his later beatification record that Lysko was a married priest. He was assigned to rural parish work, first at Kotliv (also given as Kotliw) and later at Kylvany in the Lviv region. Those years spanned the Second World War, successive occupations, and, after 1944, the Soviet reconquest of western Ukraine. In 1946 a state-sponsored gathering in Lviv purported to dissolve the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and fold it into the Russian Orthodox Church, an act Rome never recognized. Clergy who refused to submit were arrested, imprisoned, or deported.

Lysko remained in communion with Rome and continued pastoral work. The NKVD arrested him on 9 September 1949 and confined him in the Brygidki prison in Lviv, a former convent used as a jail. Soviet records attributed his death on 14 October 1949 to heart failure. Fellow prisoners and later church tradition held instead that he was walled up alive and that for a time other inmates could hear him singing the Psalms before the sound stopped. His body was not released to his family, and no verified burial place is known.

On 27 June 2001, during an apostolic visit to Ukraine, Pope John Paul II beatified Lysko in Lviv together with other Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops, priests, religious, and laity killed under Soviet rule. He is venerated as a blessed hieromartyr. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church commemorates him with these companions on 27 June. He has not been canonized, and no distinctive patronages of places, professions, or causes are firmly recorded in standard directories.

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