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Archbishop Vasyl Velychkovsky, C.SS.R. (1903 – 1973)
Vasyl Velychkovsky was born on July 1, 1903 in Stanislaviv (today Ivano-Frankivsk). His parents, Volodymyr and Anne (née Theodorowych) were catechists. In 1920 he entered the Major Seminary in Lviv to pursue his studies for the Priesthood. While a deacon, he heard the Divine call to enter the religious state, and entered the novitiate of the Redemptorist Fathers at Holosko near Lviv. He made his first profession in August, 1925, and soon after was ordained by Bishop Joseph Bocian to the priesthood. The young Fr Velychkovsky was a teacher at the Redemptorist Minor Seminary at Zboisk until 1928. Then, like Bishop Charnetsky he became a missionary in Volynia, working for the return of the Orthodox to the Church for seven years as well as ministering to the pastoral needs of Galician Catholics in the region. In 1935 he returned to Galicia, working on the parish missions with great success. In 1943, he was named superior of the house at Ternopil. The second Soviet occupation of Galicia and the open persecution of the Church which followed in its wake saw Fr Velychkovsky arrested in March, 1945. He was taken to Kiev, where for almost two years he underwent a terrible process of interrogation. The courts of Kiev sentenced him to the maximum penalty: death by a firing squad. After he spent three months on death row, his sentence was then commuted to ten years of hard labour. This took place in the notorious Vorkuta labour camps above the Arctic circle. On his release, in 1955 Fr Velychkovsky returned to Lviv. Metropolitan (later Cardinal) Joseph Slipyj, the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, had been imprisoned in the GULAG camps for 18 years when his released was obtained in 1963 for diplomatic reasons. He had named Fr Velychkovsky his successor as head of the Underground Church, and on his return trip from Siberia to Rome, he was able secretly to consecrate the latter a bishop in a Moscow hotel room.Through this consecration and those performed in turn by the new Archbishop (a title of honour given to Velychkovsky and his successor as head of the Underground Church, Archbishop Volodymyr Sterniuk, C.SS.R.), the hierarchy of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Ukraine was able to be maintained throughout the years of persecution. In 1969 he was
once again arrested and sentenced to three years of hard labour in
the camps of Siberia. During this second imprisonment he underwent
severe torture and his health was destroyed. To prevent his dying
in prison, he was injected with a drug to make him lose his mental
faculties and released in 1972. His final persecution was at the hands
of ecumenical politicians. On his arrival in Rome a Vatican spokesman
referred to him simply as “Father Velychkovsky”. He died
soon after in Winnipeg, Canada on July 30, 1973. |
