Life
He was born in village of Zazdrist, Galicia (in modern Ternopil oblast), then a crownland of Austria-Hungary. He studied at the Lviv Greek-Catholic Seminary and Innsbruck University in Austria, before being ordained a priest on June 30, 1917. From 1920 to 1922, he studied at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome and the Pontifical Gregorian University. He returned to Lwów (Lviv), by then part of Second Polish Republic, and taught at the seminary, eventually becoming its rector.
On December 22, 1939, with the blessing of Pope Pius XII, Slipyj was ordained archbishop of Serrae and Coadjutor Archbishop of Lviv with the right of succession. The ordination was conducted by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky in secrecy due to the Soviet presence and the political situation.
Slipyj became the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church on November 1, 1944, following Sheptytsky's death.
After Soviet troops captured Lwow, Josyf Slipyj lamented in his letter to the clergy of the city dated 23 November 1944 about his wish of peace and victory to the Union of Soviet Republics. Slipyj was arrested along with other bishops in 1945 by the NKVD, convicted to penal servitude, allegedly for collaboration with the Nazi regime. This was the first step in the planned liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church by Soviet authorities. After being jailed in Lviv, Kiev, and Moscow, a Soviet court sentenced him to eight years of hard labor in the Siberian Gulag.
At this time Soviet authorities forcibly convened an assembly of 216 priests, and on 9 March 1946 and the following day, the so-called "Synod of Lviv" was held in St. George's Cathedral. The Union of Brest, the council at which the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church formally entered into ecclesiastic communion with the Holy See, was revoked. The Church was forcibly "rejoined" to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Slipyj's prison writings managed to circulate. In 1957 Pope Pius XII sent him a congratulatory letter on the 40th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood. It was confiscated, and also on account of his circulating writings, he was sentenced to seven more years in prison. On January 23, 1963, he was freed by Nikita Khrushchev's administration after political pressure from Pope John XXIII and United States President John F. Kennedy. He arrived in Rome in time to participate in the Second Vatican Council.
In 1949 he had been secretly (in pectore) named a cardinal by Pope Pius XII, but in 1965 he was named publicly, and appointed Cardinal-Priest of Sant'Atanasio. At the time he was the 4th cardinal in Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church history. Beginning in 1963 many Ukrainian bishops lobbied for Slipyj to be named patriarch, but Pope Paul VI refused, instead creating the new office of major archbishop and appointing Slipyj as its first incumbent on 23 December 1963. In 1977 Slipyj consecrated Ivan Choma, Stepan Czmil and Lubomyr Husar as bishops without approval of the pope in an act of exposition of patriarchal aspirations. These consecrations caused much annoyance to the Roman Curia as episcopal consecrations without papal permission are considered illicit in Roman Canon Law but not Eastern Canon Law.
He died in Rome on September 7, 1984. After the fall of the Soviet Union, his relics were returned to St. George's Cathedral in Lviv in 1992.
His cause for canonisation has been introduced at Rome.
Read more about this topic: Josyf Slipyj
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