A great Christian witness, too little known in the West

The Venerable Andrei Sheptytsky, who died eighty years ago on November 1, 1944, was one of 20th-century Catholicism’s outstanding figures, whose remarkable life and heroic ministry as leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church spanned 43 years, two world wars, five pontificates, Stalin’s terror-famine (the “Holodomor,” in which at least 6 million Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death), and a half-dozen changes of government in the territories in which he served.

Amidst that turmoil, Sheptytsky became a crucial figure in refining modern Ukraine’s national identity, while his cultural, ecumenical, interreligious, and pastoral initiatives anticipated the teaching of the Second Vatican Council and the Church of the New Evangelization. So, on this eightieth anniversary of Metropolitan Andrew’s passover to his present, exalted position in the Communion of Saints, attention should be paid.

Count Roman Aleksandr Maria Szeptycki was born in 1865 in a village near L’viv in then-Austrian Galicia to a family descended from Ruthenian and Polish nobility. Over a decade and a half, his studies took him to L’viv, Kraków, and Breslau (today’s Wrocław); he also traveled to Kyiv, Moscow, and Rome, where, in 1888, he met Pope Leo XIII. A few months after that encounter, Sheptytsky, who had adopted the Ukrainian spelling of his surname, joined the Greek Catholic Basilian Order of St. Josaphat, taking the religious name Andrew–St. Peter’s brother and the great patron of Eastern Catholicism. Ordained priest in 1892, he earned a doctorate in theology and, in 1898, founded a religious community based on the rule of St. Theodore the Studite, with the aim of reforming Ukrainian Greek Catholic monasticism. A year later, he was named a bishop, and in late 1900, Leo XIII concurred in his appointment as Metropolitan of Halych, Archbishop of L’viv, and Bishop of Kamianets-Podilskyi, positions he assumed in January 1901 at age 36.

Metropolitan Andrew carried out a lengthy and vigorous episcopate under extraordinarily challenging circumstances, as Ukraine struggled to refine and defend its national identity: first, in the face of Russian and Polish pressures; then, amidst a Soviet-era genocide; and finally, during a brutal Nazi occupation. Against the opposition of the czars and often traveling in disguise, he worked to build up the Eastern Catholic Churches in the Russian Empire before 1917. Concurrently, he tried to temper Polish and Ukrainian nationalist rivalries in the turbulent latter years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire while invigorating the Greek Catholic Church in Emperor Franz Joseph’s domains. In all cases, and to all parties in the faction-ridden Ukrainian lands, he urged a spirit of fraternal charity and ecumenical sensitivity, as previously imperial territories like today’s Poland and Ukraine–long carved up by Russia and Austria-Hungary–struggled to establish their independence in the aftermath of World War I.

As modern Ukrainian national identity was being formed in the early twentieth century, Metropolitan Andrew built institutions of culture to shape a future Ukraine in continuity with the nation’s origins in the baptism of the eastern Slavs at Kyiv in 988 A.D.: a seminary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions, and a national museum to preserve and support Ukraine’s artistic heritage. As a pastor, he strove to deepen the faith of his people through effective catechesis, encouraged youth ministry, and made a lasting contribution to Ukraine’s religious life by supporting Studite monasticism and inviting the Byzantine-rite Redemptorists into his dioceses.

The flails of Soviet and Nazi German brutality hit Sheptytsky and his people with unmitigated fury, and while Metropolitan Andrew at first welcomed the 1941 German invasion of Ukrainian lands as a means of crushing Stalinism, he soon recognized the monstrous evils being perpetrated by the invaders, writing Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in February 1942 to protest the slaughter of Jews. In cooperation with his brother Klymentiy, a Studite monk beatified in 2001, he saved hundreds of Jewish children, hiding them in Greek Catholic institutions, while he personally gave shelter in his residence to the son of a leading L’viv rabbi. In August 1942, he wrote Pope Pius XII, describing the Nazis’ mass murders and admitting that he had originally misread Hitler’s intentions in Ukraine; three months later, he issued a pastoral letter, Thou Shalt Not Kill, publicly protesting the German reign of terror and excommunicating its perpetrators. One of those he saved, David Kahane, later became chief rabbi of the Israeli air force.

Metropolitan Andrew’s legacy–deep piety, intellectual depth, cultural sophistication, mature patriotism, ecumenical and interreligious charity–lives on in the vitality of today’s Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, led by Sheptytsky’s worthy successor, Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk. As Ukraine fights for its life and the freedom of the West, we should honor the memory of this great Christian witness and pray for his intercession.