Martyr and Confessor of the Ukrainian Catholic Church
Figurehead in the Confrontation between Catholicism and Communism

by Maurice de Nessy
With grateful acknowledgements to Fideliter, No. 52

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

At the beginning of Chapter XLIV of Ecclesiasticus, the son of Sirach exhorts us: "Now let us call the roll of famous men that were our fathers long ago. What high achievements the Lord has made known in them, ever since time began!" This expresses a very proper instinct of the human heart, almost literally a "gut feeling" of a bond with our ancestors. Thanks to photography, man can now reverently preserve even the very features of his forefathers as never before, the very look in their eyes—a look which can sometimes seem to follow us wherever we go. Whoever they may have been we are all in some sense proud of our ancestors, and even their weaknesses and faults meet in us with a degree of indulgence, as when Sem and Japheth respected and covered the over-exuberance of Noe (Gen. 9, 23). The Church respects this particular principle. From her long and rich history she selects examples whose lives, brimming with virtues, offer at every level examples of Christian living, teaching us to live fervently and to die well. We are, of course, speaking of those men and women we know as saints and "beati." It is unfortunate that enthusiasts for "progress," "movements," "insights," "growth," "dynamics," and all the rest of the post-conciliar jargon, have made a massacre of these Christian ancestors of ours. The niches in our church walls now stand empty,¹ and down from the pillars have come all those saints who are no longer "relevant."

It is an irony that this should have happened in our own age, when assuredly the Church is producing more martyrs and confessors than ever before in her history. At least two-thirds of the Earth have heard their cries, their blood has soaked two-thirds of its soil. And yet these latter-day John the Baptists, these modern Stephens, have been obstinately and systematically neglected and relegated to obscurity. The first Christians identified intensely with the persecutions, the tortures and the slaughter of their brethren.² Today we are supposed to "forget the old days, leave behind buried treasures and whited sepulchres and hasten towards a new world..." Who ever speaks nowadays of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, of Father Baranyi? Within the Catholic Church itself its most glorious heroes are forgotten, even denied by their own brothers and sisters, so afraid are these of the Monster bristling with rockets and tanks. It is the fear of the cowardly Prusias II³ before the Romans. "Don't get me into trouble with the Republic!" was his cry. Well, that is why I propose to swim against the current and make known to our readers one of the most sublime figures of the Church of our time, Cardinal Josyf Slipyi, Patriarch of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Confessor of the Faith, and Martyr for Jesus Christ.

The Origins of a Hero

Zazdrist is a little village in Southern Poland, situated in that part of the country handed over to Austria under the name of Galicia at the first partition of Poland in 1772.⁴ It is a region of small, rounded hills, the final slopes of the Carpathians towards the northeast. Abundant streams irrigate scattered forests and a heavy soil which is nonetheless good for agriculture. Here and there are farms run by solid, hardworking peasants with their large families. Their produce is sold locally, at Lviv,⁵ the capital, and though the people could not be called wealthy, they are fairly comfortably off.

Josyf Slipyi was born in Zazdrist on 17 February 1892. The people lived a solid Christian faith in the Easter tradition in communion with Rome, served by numerous clergy of the Byzantine Rite under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of Lviv.⁶ It has to be recognized that in those days the Austrian sector of Poland always enjoyed a large measure of freedom within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was a model of indulgence towards the various racial groups which composed it. The same cannot be said of those parts of Poland which were under Russian and Prussian domination.

Josyf was a serious and determined boy who soon discovered that he had a vocation to the priesthood. His parish priest encouraged him, and arranged for him to study with the Studite monks at Lviv, where he distinguished himself intellectually. He was ordained priest on 30 September 1917, by Metropolitan Andrei Szeptitski of Lviv,⁷ who then sent him for further studies to the University of Innsbruck, and later, after the Armistice of 1918, to Rome, where he obtained his doctorate and mastership in theology.

The Zeal of an Apostolate

Josyf Slipyi returned to Lviv in 1922 after five years' absence. He had, however, seen his bishop in Rome in 1920 when, freshly liberated from a tsarist prison, he had convoked the Synod of Ukrainian Catholic Bishops, thus reviving an ancient tradition whose purpose was to maintain solid and alive their Church's union with the Roman Pontiff.

Upon Father Josyf's return to Lviv, the Metropolitan made him his secretary. In 1925 came a professorship at the major seminary, and then the rectorate of the recently founded Lviv Theological Academy, a post he was to hold until 1944. During this time he founded a theological review entitled Bohoslavia (Glory to God), for which he wrote numerous leading articles, and was also president of the Scientifico-theological Society of Lviv, as well as participating in the congresses of various societies at Velehrad, Prague, Pinsk, Lviv, etc. All this activity overlay certain internal problems, however. What had been Ruthenia was now divided more or less equally between the U.S.S.R. and Poland. Inevitably all the dioceses in the Soviet sector had had to go underground, but even in the Polish half there were problems, for there the Byzantine Rite Catholics were not looked upon with any great favor by their Latin Rite brethren. Their less structured organization, their married clergy, "burdened" with children, their more exotic liturgy and what appeared to be their relatively primitive society all attracted a degree of hostility which sometimes gave rise to serious incidents verging on pogroms.

Then suddenly, on 23 August 1939, the pact between Hitler and Stalin was announced, and Nazi-Soviet forces invaded Poland to partition it for a fifth time. A first martyrdom was beginning for the Ukrainian Catholic Church. In August 1939 the Vatican, anticipating the worst, had secretly granted extraordinary faculties to Metropolitan Andrei. In virtue of these, he and three other exarchs were able to gather discreetly in Andrei's private chapel, there to consecrate bishop the Metropolitan's coadjutor with right of succession, Josyf Slipyi.

"But you are asking me to take on a terrible responsibility," Slipyi had protested. "It will be even more terrible if you do not accept it," had replied the Metropolitan.

As it turned out, Ukrainian Catholics did not have to suffer much at the hands of the Russian army of occupation. Their chief tormentors were to be the Russian Orthodox clergy, sent by the Patriarch Alexis of Moscow to attempt to force the bishops and priests to break with Rome. They had pastors removed from their parishes by the secret police, and many priests were imprisoned or exiled to the Urals. Numerous churches were taken away from their Catholic congregations during this persecution by the foul alliance of Russian Church and Red Army, an alliance which would be devilishly renewed in 1945. What is more, 750,000 souls were "re-settled" in Siberia to serve the munitions factories.

Thus, when the German Army invaded Russian Poland on 21 June 1941, there was a period of respite. The Wehrmacht behaved correctly,⁸ and re-established Christian worship throughout the region, but it was too good to last, and when Rosenberg's Propagandastaffel took over, religion had to go back to hiding in the shadows. Metropolitan Andrei protested and for his pains was imprisoned at Prezemysl in August 1942.

The tide of war turned again. In 1944 the victorious Russian Army reoccupied southern Poland and freed the Metropolitan. However, exhausted by the hardships of his imprisonment, Andrei Szeptitski died on November 1, 1944. The Soviets, too, had restored freedom of worship, and the Metropolitan's solemn funeral rites were celebrated in St. George's Cathedral at Lviv by his successor, Josyf Slipyi. The military authorities were represented by a young political commissar named Nikita Kruschev... In December of 1944 the new Metropolitan sent a delegation to Moscow to seek state recognition of his church. It was granted, but Mgr. Slipyi was requested to persuade the Ukrainian rebels to give up their struggle for national independence. He could not possibly persuade them; he had fallen into a trap.

Was the détente initiated by the Russians all a trick from the start, or were they in earnest? Whatever the truth may have been, the new Metropolitan seems to have trusted them at the time, and he received many visits—apparently friendly—from Orthodox dignitaries. But they all kept insisting on the unity of Christians, on the importance of the Patriarch Alexis, and on the blunders and errors of the Roman Church. Mgr. Slipyi became suspicious, and his bishops with him. The truth would out the following April 1, 1945, in a message from the Muscovite Patriarch "to the priests and faithful of the Greek Catholic Church in the Ukraine." He openly urged priests and people to rebel against their bishops and against the Pope, and to reunited with orthodoxy. "Hitler," he claimed, "was puppet of the Vatican... Catholic dogmas besmirch the purity of Orthodoxy... Pius XII is in league with the abettors of Fascism... the Catholic bishops collaborated with the Nazis..." It was the lightning before the storm. During the night of April 11,1945, Mgr. Slipyi and ten other bishops were arrested and imprisoned in Kiev, followed in May by all canons, religious superiors and the most influential priests. In a fortnight the Catholic Church in the Ukraine had been effectively deprived of leadership. The next to be taken were the leading laity. In 1929 Russian legislation on religious practice was imposed, and ecclesiastical goods were confiscated or handed over to the Moscow church. An Orthodox bishop was installed at Lviv in place of Mgr. Slipyi, and on June 18, 1945, he inaugurated an "action group for the reunification of the Russian Church."

The Blissful Martyr

Ways were found to keep Mgr. Slipyi secretly abreast of all these misfortunes. They obviously caused him enormous grief, but as he was to say in later years, what really made him suffer was the fact that this religious genocide could go on quite openly without one word of condemnation or protest from the rest of the world, which was perfectly well aware of what was happening.

The destruction of Mgr. Slipyi's church was finalized at the Council of Union held at Lviv on 8-10 March 1946. Patriarch Alexis had consecrated three apostate priests as bishops, and around them gathered three hundred priests and laymen who decided to "renounce their union with Rome, to break all ties with the Vatican, and to return to the Orthodox Faith."⁹ The imprisoned bishops were then required to assent to this fait accompli. All refused, despite proffered bribes of high rank and dignity, all were sent to the gulags, and all perished there, save only their Metropolitan who alone was spared by Divine Providence to be the witness to their martyrdom.

On January 7, 1945 he had been sentenced to eight years hard labor. He served this sentence, and in 1953 was promptly condemned to another five years. In 1958 he received a third sentence, this time of four years, and in 1962, since he still refused to apostatize, he was sent for life to the dreaded labor camps of Mordov, a desert of rock and swamp in central Russia.

This 7000 km. trail of bloody misery led him to see something of the whole of the gulag system: Viatka, Pechora, Novosibirsk, then, along the Yenesei River,¹⁰ Norilsk, Boimy, Yenesysk, Maklokovo, Krasnoyarsk; far-off Kamchatka, and then back to Europe to complete the infernal round at Vorkuta, Intainkomi and Mordov, the whole long trail of bitter tears marked out for its victims by communism triumphant in its Soviet empire. And the torturers knew well how to use the alternation of warm and cold, soft and hard in the treatment of their "subjects." At the end of each period of hardship Mgr. Slipyi was allowed a time of peace, even of comfort, which always ended with a tempting proposition: freedom and the Metropolitan See of Kiev in the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1962 he was even offered the title of Patriarch of All the Russias! He could not know at the time that a solemn consistory on Mary 28,1962, Pope John XXIII had raised him in petto to the sacred purple, along with three other bishops imprisoned for their faith in communist countries. Cardinal Slipyi would learn of this from Cardinal Testa only on the day of his official elevation, January 25, 1965.

Several times during his imprisonment Mgr. Slipyi was at the point of death. Under interminable interrogation at Novosibirsk he collapsed, and his fellow prisoners had to call for hours to get some hot water, which saved his life. At Krasnoyarsk, Vice-President Nixon was due to pass by on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and some "zeks" (deportees) were working on the track, Josyf Slipyi among them. To keep them out of sight they were locked up in a narrow, unventilated room. Many died there. Each time the bishop fainted some of his comrades would drag him to a tiny opening where there was just enough air getting in to save him. There are some other surviving witnesses of this event, but very few...

The Ukrainian Jesuit Father Leoni recalls his arrival at the camp at Potma: "... At that moment some other political prisoners were also thrown into the filthy cell... then I heard a voice calling my name. An old man with a white beard took my hand. "Josyf Slipyi," he said. What joy, and what sorrow, thus to find myself in that place, in the presence of my Metropolitan!"

An Austrian prisoner, Professor Grobauer, saw him at Intainkomi, "dressed in rags bound with strips of cloth at the ankles and knees, with nothing to protect him against a temperature of forty-five degrees below freezing. A true Ecce homo! And yet he remained serene and understanding, even kindly towards the brutal guards and the sniveling informers who surrounded him... We had arrived in a cattle truck, and then we were forced to march through the night in thick snow. The archbishop collapsed. A guard beat him with his rifle butt until he got to his feet, but he fell again. The guard could not get him up by brutality, so I lifted him and carried him. When we arrived at our destination the exhausted Metropolitan sat down to rest on his little suitcase. Two young men came up and snatched it from him and left him in the snow, his mouth and nose bleeding..." It reads like the Acta Martyrum of the first centuries although then the executioners dispatched their victims reasonably quick, and not with eighteen years of refined tortures. Now they were bent on destroying their enemies still, but first they would get the last possible ounce of work out of them in the worst possible conditions, take away their identity, reduce them at no cost to the State to docile automatons. In these gateways of hell, Josyf Slipyi endured every manner of outrage—kicked, punched in the face, publicly insulted, emptying slop-pails in icy nights, his body forced to assume ridiculous positions, subjected to obscene songs, deprived of sleep...¹¹ But this regime, which should have destroyed a man in a few months, found in him a sturdy son of the soil and a man whose self-control helped him to hold out physically and morally month after month, year after year. He himself wrote of his experiences in this Spiritual Testament:

The final station on Mgr. Slipyi's Way of the Cross was the hardest. Mordov is a vast, desolate region in central Russia, to the west of Saransk, its capital. It consists of virtually desert basins separated by rocky mountains, with hugely wide variations of temperature. The Soviet authorities have established there a network of labor camps, in effect factories specializing in the mass production of simple articles (e.g., gloves, fabrics, boxes, flat irons, etc.). Inmates work a ten-hour day. Any flagging is quickly dealt with by the whips and clubs of the guards, just as in the Nazi concentration camps. At night the prisoners sleep piled five high in tiny cells spattered with filth and crawling with vermin and lice. Even in these conditions the Metropolitan was still strong enough to hold out. Better yet, he actually managed to celebrate Holy Mass by consecrating scraps of bread and the juice of grapes obtained from a sympathetic guard. And it was there, too, that as they did at Dachau, he consecrated three bishops who may still be ministering up there in a gulag somewhere near the Arctic Circle. Here is another extract from Mgr. Slipyi's Spiritual Testament:

That same Providence thus permitted Josyf Slipyi to become a rare and vital witness, for how many men return from a gulag surrounded by mountains bristling with watch-towers and totally cut off from the outside world by a forest full of wolves and an impenetrable ice-barrier.¹² As the bishop wrote himself: "How many poor souls, living skeletons already, were enable to die in great peace," thanks to his unobtrusive ministrations! How many indeed? We shall never know. For here in the West we tread softly and choose our words carefully when we speak at all of these abominable exterminations. Yet St. Paul tells us clearly: "Remember your prelates who have spoken the word of God to you: whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation" (Heb. 13, 7).

But how can you expect L.I.C.R.A., Amnesty International, the World Council of Churches, CAFOD and UNESCO to take any notice of these trifles? They already have their hands full with Pinochet, apartheid, Marcos, Duvallier, et al... "Come on, now, don't you think Communist crimes and cruelties have been really rather exaggerated?"

On the credit side it should be pointed out that Pope Pius XII intervened many times on behalf of the Ukrainians and their Metropolitan. He published two encyclicals concerning them, one in 1945 and one in 1952, in which he accused Patriarch Alexis of complicity in their persecutions, and at Christmas 1957, he sent a moving letter to the Metropolitan on the fortieth anniversary of the latter's priestly ordination. But these laudable initiatives, alas, did nothing to ameliorate the situation.

Providence, however, chose a somewhat spectacular way of declaring its hand. The Red dictator, Nikita Kruschev, had a daughter married to an ambitious and astute journalist, Alexander Adjubei. Determined to make the most of his connections, Adjubei got himself sent on a round-the-world mission. This in due course led him to Italy, where he found ample opportunity to indulge his passion for art. He went to Rome and was duly captivated. Then came the idea of seeking an audience with Pope John XXIII. The Pontiff agreed immediately, and in most paternal fashion bore his guests off to admire some of the masterpieces of Raphael. By this time the information service of the Secretariat of State had located Josyf Slipyi in Mordov, and the Pope had seen his chance. At the close of the audience he made the customary gifts to Adjubei and his wife, and in response to their effusive thanks gave them his most winning smile and explained to them the case of Josyf Slipyi. The Russian couple, charmed by the warmth of their reception, promised to see what could be done, and once back in Moscow they kept their word. On January 26, 1963, the convict Slipyi was removed from Mordov without explanation. It was only on the way to Moscow that he would be told what had happened.

"I had no thoughts of leaving the Soviet Ukraine;" he wrote afterwards, "I simply wanted to secure for the Ukrainian Catholic Church the rights it had enjoyed in the U.S.S.R. up until 1946, and to which it is entitled by the Constitution..."

The joy of his liberation was to prove illusory. At Moscow an airplane and a Vatican official were waiting for him, and in no time at all he was on his way to Rome! Such haste was indeed necessary. The Beast had relented momentarily, but might change its mind without warning at any time. There was not a minute to lose.

Notes

1.  In France, at least, it was only the "wicked" law of Separation of Church and State (1905) which has saved some of the finest treasures of Church art from destruction or sale! Much has been lost even so, and has frequently gone to line the pockets of antique dealers and even of some unscrupulous priests.

2. Mass was celebrated on their tombs, and the practice of enclosing relics in every altar and altar-stone survived until our own time. Now the requirement has been abolished on the grounds that it "smelled of superstition"!

3. "Ah! Ne me brouillez pas avec la République." The quotation is from Corneille's play Nicomede, Act II, sc. 3.

4. Poland has been partitioned five times: in 1772, 1793, 1795, 1939 and 1945.

5. Lviv in Ukrainian, Lwow in Polish, and Leinberg in German.

6. The deplorable Eastern Schism of 1074 had raised a great feeling of aversion for the Holy See, but the Metropolitans (Archbishops) of Kiev, Halycz, and Lviv restored unity with Rome by the Pact of Union of Brest-Litovsk (1595) conserving their rites, laws and entitlements and customs. The reaction of the Orthodox Muscovites was extremely harsh. They murdered St. Josaphat Kuncewycz, Metropolitan of Polotzk (1623) and in Russian Poland the Tsars tried several times to suppress this free Ruthenian Church in communion with Rome. Their efforts were in vain, despite several massacres of Catholic peasants.

7. In August 1914, the Russian Army had invaded Galicia, and already, under pressure from the Orthodox leaders, attempts were being made to bring about the apostasy of the Ruthenian Catholic clergy. Metropolitan Andrei, arrested in the night, was imprisoned in the monastery of Souzdal, 200 km. northeast of Moscow, where he was subjected to countless indignities. The 1917 revolution enabled him to escape, and, after many adventures, to return to Lviv.

8. The Wehrmacht authorities were able to make clever use of this impression of religious liberation in Russia and elsewhere with the retreat of the atheistic Soviet authorities. They re-established a free Russian Church, with its "patriarch," Ivan, at Minsk, and it had a great deal of success. With the return of the Russians all the clergy and faithful who had not fled were shot. The "patriarch" died in America in 1970.

9. It should be noted that these painful and scandalous events, triumphantly recalled by the Patriarch Pimen at his installation in Moscow during the 1971 Synod provoked no reaction or protest from the prelates whom Rome had sent as representatives.

10. The Soviet penal system authorizes the governor of a gulag to prolong a prisoner's sentence for any fault in discipline or work, this innocent little custom provides a never-ending supply of free labor. Also, extremely harsh camps have been provided at the mouths of the great Siberian rivers, and more further upstream. Thus, on the Yenesei there are Dudinka and Norilsk, then Igarka, Tunguska, Yeneseysk, and finally Krasnoyarsk, an industrial town and an important station on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The convicts start off in the far north, and are then moved by stages down towards the south, depending on their "good conduct" and "satisfactory productivity." But if the "zek" (deportee) fails in his "duties," or if his health gives out, he is sent back north to the starting point, and the whole cycle begins again. This system was perfected and in operation by 1920. The Nazi camps were simply crude imitations of it.

11. These are the same frightful and refined tortures that Cardinal Tchidimbo suffered for eight years in Guinea under the vile regime of Sékou Touré. It is true that wherever its reigns, Communism, "intrinsically evil," has built for itself a pedestal of human corpses and tortured victims still feebly groaning.

12. These witnesses are so few in number! Apart from Metropolitan Slipyi and Chalamov, already mentioned, there are Solzhenitsyn and Nicole Sadunaité who have written of their experiences... and that is all, out of a convict population of nearly five million, constantly changing.