Volodymyr Pryjma

Volodymyr Pryjma was born on 17 July 1906 in the village of Stradch in the Yavoriv district of eastern Galicia, then a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He belonged to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Byzantine-rite Catholic community that had been the principal church of the Ukrainian population of Galicia since the Union of Brest. After receiving the specialized training given to church cantors, he served as diak (cantor) and choir director of the parish in his native village. In the Eastern liturgical tradition the cantor occupies a prominent place in public worship, intoning the responses, leading the congregation, and assisting the priest; in rural Galicia the office was a respected lay ministry often held by a married man of the parish.

Pryjma married and settled into the life of a village church servant during the interwar period, when Stradch lay in the Second Polish Republic. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, headed by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, remained a central institution of Ukrainian religious and national life despite political pressures from the Polish state. In September 1939 eastern Galicia was annexed by the Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Soviet authorities immediately began to restrict the Church, confiscate property, and monitor clergy and active laypeople. The German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 produced a brief and violent interregnum. As the Red Army and the NKVD withdrew, security organs carried out mass killings of prisoners and of persons regarded as potentially disloyal.

On 26 June 1941 Father Mykola Konrad, the parish priest of Stradch and a former professor at the Lviv Theological Academy, was summoned to bring the sacraments to a sick woman living near or in the forest outside the village. Cantor Volodymyr Pryjma accompanied him. The two men were intercepted by NKVD agents, taken into the woods, tortured, and killed. When their bodies were later found, they showed signs of extreme violence; contemporary accounts state that Pryjma had been beaten to death. They were buried in Stradch.

After the underground existence of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church during the remaining Soviet decades, and following the Church’s emergence from illegality in the late 1980s, the causes of a number of clergy and faithful killed for their faith in the twentieth century were introduced. Volodymyr Pryjma was among twenty-seven Ukrainian Greek Catholic martyrs whose beatification was celebrated by Pope John Paul II on 27 June 2001 during the papal visit to Lviv. He is venerated as a blessed martyr. His individual memoria is associated with 26 June, the day of his death; he is also commemorated with the group of Ukrainian martyrs. He was a married layman, not a member of a religious order, and is one of the relatively few married lay martyrs raised to the honors of the altar in the modern Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.