He was a renaissance man who had studied art and music in his younger years, a leader with a developed political consciousness who was a member of the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in the 1930s. During
World War II he was a
prisoner of war in
Germany. He was
ordained to the
diaconate on August 3, 1947, and to the
priesthood on August 10 of that same year. In 1947–89 he was a member of the
clergy of the
Moscow Patriarchate. In 1989 he and the other members of the clergy left the
Moscow Patriarchate and declared to be put under the omophor of the
Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church under
Metropolitan Mstyslav (Skrypnyk) who was at that time the head of the
Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in USA and Canada. By 1990, with the
Soviet Union falling apart,
The Right Rev Fr. Dymitry Yarema initiated and was a participant in the first All-Ukrainian Sobor of the
UAOC, held in
Kyiv in 1990, which elected
Metropolitan Mstyslav as the first
patriarch of
Ukraine. In 1993 he took his
monastic vows and then was
ordained bishop of
Pereyaslav and
Sicheslav by Archbishop of Lviv Petro (Petrus). At the 2nd Council of the Church in 1993 he was voted
Patriarch of Kyiv and all Rus’-Ukraine. In late 1998 the aging Patriarch Dymytriy, his health weakening, determined that the future of the Church would be strengthen if it would turn once again to the
Ukrainian diaspora, which had maintained the
UAOC during nearly 70 years of
Communist rule in
Ukraine. The choice Patriarch Dymytriy made in his
last will and testament to request that the
UAOC hierarchy agree to allow
Metropolitan Constantine of the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA to guide it – which, if carried out, would effectively unite the two Churches – was a calculated move to save the UAOC from further incursions from the larger
Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarchate, and the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). ==References==