Symeon Lukach

Symeon Lukach (also spelled Simeon Lukach) was a bishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and a martyr of Soviet persecution in the twentieth century. He was born on 7 July 1893 in the village of Starunya in eastern Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary and now in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast in western Ukraine. After theological studies he was ordained a priest in 1919, in the unsettled years that followed the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy. He spent much of his priestly life as a professor of moral theology at the Greek Catholic seminary in Stanislaviv (today Ivano-Frankivsk), forming clergy for the eparchy until the Soviet authorities closed the seminary in 1945.

The Soviet annexation of western Ukraine after the Second World War was accompanied by a systematic attempt to suppress the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and to force its clergy and faithful into the Russian Orthodox Church. In that setting Bishop Hryhoriy Khomyshyn of Stanislaviv secretly consecrated Lukach as a bishop in April 1945, so that underground Catholic life might retain episcopal leadership and sacramental succession. Lukach thereafter ministered in clandestinity. He was arrested by the NKVD on 26 October 1949 and sent into the Soviet labour-camp system. Released in 1955, he resumed secret pastoral work rather than abandon his flock.

He was arrested again on 12 July 1962 and sentenced to a further term of imprisonment. Before he could be returned to the camps he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The authorities released him, and he spent his last period of life in his native village. He died in Starunya on 22 August 1964.

Pope John Paul II beatified him in Lviv on 27 June 2001, during an apostolic visit to Ukraine, together with other Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops, priests, religious, and lay faithful recognized as martyrs of Communist persecution. He is commemorated among those blessed martyrs of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, whose group memorial is observed on 27 June. His life is remembered as one of fidelity to the Catholic communion under a regime that sought to destroy the Greek Catholic hierarchy.