Vasyl Velychkovsky

Vasyl Velychkovsky was born on 1 June 1903 in Stanislaviv (present-day Ivano-Frankivsk) in Galicia, then a crown land of Austria-Hungary. He came from a Ukrainian Greek Catholic priestly family and was raised in the liturgical and pastoral tradition of that Church. After studies for the priesthood he entered the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, the Redemptorists, whose Ukrainian foundation in Galicia had been established in the early twentieth century with the help of Belgian Redemptorists. He was ordained a priest in 1925. In the following years he worked as a missionary preacher, including in Volhynia, where the Redemptorists served Ukrainian Greek Catholics and sought the reunion of Orthodox Christians with the Catholic Church. He became known as a retreat master and as a promoter of devotion to the Mother of Perpetual Help, a characteristic Redemptorist apostolate.

During the Second World War western Ukraine passed under successive Soviet and German occupations. Velychkovsky continued his ministry and at one stage was superior of the Redemptorist community in Ternopil. When Soviet power was restored and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was forcibly suppressed—most infamously through the 1946 Lviv gathering that claimed to abolish the Church and absorb it into the Russian Orthodox Church—he refused to abandon Catholic communion. Arrested in 1945, he was condemned to death; the sentence was commuted to a long term of imprisonment. He spent about ten years in the Gulag, including forced labor in the coal mines of Vorkuta in the far north, and was released in 1955.

Returning to western Ukraine, he resumed clandestine pastoral work for the underground Greek Catholic Church: celebrating the Divine Liturgy in secret, hearing confessions, instructing the faithful, and writing on Marian devotion. In 1963, after Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj was released from decades of imprisonment and while Slipyj was briefly in Moscow before departing for Rome, Slipyj secretly consecrated Velychkovsky a bishop so that the prohibited Church would retain episcopal leadership. Velychkovsky was associated with the see of Lutsk and became a principal figure in the clandestine hierarchy. The Soviet authorities arrested him again in 1969. He was imprisoned, interrogated, and harshly treated. Released in 1972 in broken health, he was permitted to leave the Soviet Union.

He traveled first to Yugoslavia and then to Canada, where a large Ukrainian Catholic diaspora and a Redemptorist community received him in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He died there on 30 June 1973, his death attributed to the long-term effects of imprisonment and maltreatment. Pope John Paul II beatified him in Lviv on 27 June 2001, together with other Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops, priests, religious, and laypeople recognized as martyrs and confessors of the Soviet persecution. After a later exhumation his remains were enshrined at St. Joseph's Ukrainian Catholic Church in Winnipeg, where the Blessed Vasyl Velychkovsky Martyr's Shrine is a place of pilgrimage. He is commemorated with the blessed martyrs of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, whose feast is kept on 27 June.