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Andrew Szepticky: Father Metropolitan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2024
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Writing in the issues of this review for July 1944 and April 1945, I tried to explain the extremely complex set-up of peoples and Christian allegiances in the borderland that stretches from Lithuania to the Carpathians: that territory which was part of Poland-Lithuania from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, was partitioned between Russia and Austria in 1795, became Polish again from 1921 to 1939, and is now incorporated in the U.S.S.R. The inhabitants of the southernmost part, eastern Galicia (Galych, Halicz), are about one-third Latin Catholic Poles to three-fifths Ruthenians, i.e., Byzantine Catholic Ukrainians; and of these last I wrote that it seemed likely, in view of the circumstances and of historical precedent, that the Soviet authorities would seek to force them into the Russian Orthodox Church. Actually that process had already begun: in April 1945 all the Galician Ukrainian bishops were arrested and deported into Russia, and in March 1946 a handful of lower clergy and laity, calling themselves ‘The Synod of the Uniate Church in the Western Ukraine', reported to Marshal Stalin that the 350-year old reunion with Rome was revoked. It can hardly be doubted that the signal for this move was the death on the preceding November 1st of the archbishop of Lvov, Andrew Szepticky, who had not only been for forty-four years head of the Catholic Ukrainian church but for long the most respected and most loved of all Ukrainian public figures anywhere.
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- Copyright © 1948 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Cf. Pope Pius's encyclical letter Orientates omnes, translated in Eastern Churches Quarterly, Vol. VI, No. 6 (April-June, 1946)Google Scholar, wherein the Pope ‘recalls with special honour’ the subject of this article.
2 This was Niketas Budka. He retired and came home in 1928 and, though seventy years old and apparently a British subject, is now interned in the U.S.S.R.
3 Father Korolevsky's monograph he métrvpolite André Szeptivkyj (Grottaferrata, 1921) is the best printed source for his life up to 1920. There is a very useful commentary by Father Feuillen Mcrcenier in Irenikon, t. xix, no. 1 (Chevetogne, 1946).
4 A masterly article by the metropolitan on the Catholic and Orthodox mentalities was printed in The Commonweal (New York) for 8th October, 1930.
5 An account of the Exarch Leonid, the cause of whose canonisation may some day be introduced, was contributed by the present writer to Thought (New York), December, 1938. He received great support from some Dominican tertiary sisters, led by Mother Anna, wife of Father Vladimir Abrikosov, whose history has not yet been made fully public.
6 ‘Testis’ (an intimate friend of Szepticky) in Eastern Churches Quarterly, Vol. V, no. 11 (Eamsgate, July 1944)Google Scholar.
7 For a first-hand account of the Studites see an article by Father Korolevsky in Pax, no. 84 (Caldey Abbey, 1927).
8 For the text of this suppressed document, see Dmy trievsky's L'Union des Eglises et les Persecutions polonaises en Ukraine (Brussels, 1938). The metropolitan accused certain Polish elements of forcible ‘conversion’ of Orthodox; we now witness the opposite process.
9 See ‘Testis’, loc. cit. A translation of the people's letter, with commentary by Dom Lambert Beauduin, was printed in Pax, no. 80 (Caldey Abbey, 1926).
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