Originally published at National Catholic Register
COMMENTARY: On this 80th anniversary of Metropolitan Andrew’s passover to his present, exalted position in the Communion of Saints, attention should be paid.
The Venerable Andrei Sheptytsky, who died 80 years ago on Nov. 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.
Amid 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 80th 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 Lviv in then-Austrian Galicia to a family descended from Ruthenian and Polish nobility. Over a decade and a half, his studies took him to Lviv, Kraków, and Breslau (today’s Wrocław); he
