Blessed Vasyl Velychkovsky
Feast day: June 27
Blessed Vasyl (Basil) Velychkovsky was a Ukrainian bishop who stood up for the Catholic faith throughout several rounds of persecution and torture by the Soviet government. Born in 1903 in what is today Western Ukraine, he is still known as the “Father of the Underground Church” in Ukraine. He was the child of several generations of very devout Ukrainian Catholics, and as a teenager, Blessed Vasyl joined the army to fight for the independence of Ukraine during World War I. Zealous for souls, he believed that the best way to help his country was to become a priest and after seminary he joined the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, the Redemptorists.
A missionary, Blessed Vasyl taught and conducted missions and served as Superior of the Redemptorist monastery in Stanislaviv. With a prayer life dedicated to the Blessed Mother, he promoted devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Help as a Redemptorist and advocated praying the Rosary — a practice which would soon become a means of strength throughout a terrible trial.
Blessed Vasyl began his missions in the towns of Volyn and Kovel, where he talked to Orthodox Christians interested in becoming Catholics and also worked with much success in helping Ukrainian Catholic immigrants to the area. When conflict developed between the Ukrainian and Polish governments, he continued his parish missions elsewhere together with other Redemptorists, preaching to hundreds of thousands from village to village.
With the start of World War II, the Soviets occupied western Ukraine, and Blessed Vasyl’s evangelization efforts were targeted by the atheist, totalitarian regime. In 1940, on the feast of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Blessed Vasyl courageously led a procession of 20,000 people through the streets of Stanislaviv. As a result, he was arrested and tortured but later released by the Soviets who feared his many supporters.
Blessed Vasyl continued his mission work in converting the Orthodox by going to several different towns as he attempted to avoid both the Soviets and the German army. Eventually the Soviets declared the Ukrainian Catholic Church illegal, and Blessed Vasyl was arrested in 1945 for spreading “anti-Soviet propaganda.” He was given a chance to give up the Catholic faith and instead become a Russian Orthodox priest — an offer to which he promptly replied, “No, never! You can shoot me and kill me, but you will not get any other answer.” Sleep deprivation, isolation, and physical and moral abuse over the course of 11 interrogations finally caused him to admit to crimes he did not commit, although he never renounced his vocation as a Catholic priest. In 1946, after a trial without representatives or witnesses, he was sentenced to death by firing squad.
On death row, he ministered to prisoners who had lost hope. In particular, he preached a 10-day mission on the Catholic faith to his fellow inmates. Blessed Vasyl also made rosary beads from bits of hardened bread and showed his fellow prisoners that they could find both hope and freedom in knowing Christ through a life of prayer. He heard their confessions and helped them prepare for death.
After three months on death row, his sentence was commuted to a 10-year prison term in the coal mines of northern Russia. Undeterred, Blessed Vasyl made a small chapel in a mine shaft where he celebrated the Divine Liturgy almost every day using whatever was available for the vessels of the altar. He became the chaplain of those with whom he worked hard labor. Eventually, accused of inciting a riot amongst the prisoners, Blessed Vasyl was transferred to other prisons in the north of Russia.
In 1955, he was finally released and continued celebrating the Divine Liturgy in an underground existence from his small apartment, where he also gave spiritual direction to many. He also organized religious sisters whose monasteries had been closed and heard the confessions of apostate priests who, under threat, had agreed to become Russian Orthodox priests. For the next 36 years, until the fall of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church survived underground.
In 1959, Rome appointed Blessed Vasyl to be a bishop in this underground Church. He was ordained a bishop in a Moscow hotel room by a Metropolitan recently released from prison and en route to the Second Vatican Council. He was made the prelate in charge of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine during the Metropolitan’s absence. In 1969, Blessed Vasyl was again arrested, primarily for writing a book on Our Lady of Perpetual Help and for baptizing people. He was sentenced to three years in a psychiatric hospital where he was tortured and given drugs and electric shocks to deliberately ruin his heart and nervous system as well as his mind. And yet, although the Soviets tried to get information from him about the underground Church, Blessed Vasyl gave them none.
Near death and with the appearance of a skeleton, Blessed Vasyl was released from prison and unknowingly exiled from Ukraine. At the invitation of a Ukraine Cardinal, he was given an audience in Rome with Pope Paul VI. Then a Ukrainian Metropolitan invited him to live in Winnipeg, Canada in 1972. Blessed Vasyl gave retreats to the clergy there but, destroyed by the tortures and drugs he had received while in the psychiatric hospital, he died as a martyr on June 30, 1973.
Together with other martyrs of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Blessed Vasyl was beatified by Pope St. John Paul II in 2001, and his body, exhumed in 2003, was found to be incorrupt. It was transferred to a shrine built in St. Joseph’s Ukrainian Catholic Church in Winnipeg, where his relics are also located in the Bishop Velychkovsky National Martyr’s Shrine, dedicated to honoring this man of faith and action during the Soviet takeover of Ukraine during World War II.
Reflection
Come Holy Spirit! Fill me with the fire of your love and the gift of fortitude to never stop defending the Faith. May I work to sustain your Church even in the most difficult times.
Prayer
Grant, we pray, almighty God, that we may follow with due devotion the faith of blessed Vasyl, who, for spreading the Faith, merited the crown of martyrdom. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
