Born in
Poltava (
Russian Empire, now
Ukraine), Skrypnyk attended the Poltava First Classical
Gymnasium and dreamt of a military career through his youth. During the
Great War years he studied at the Officers' school in
Orenburg located in the Russian
Ural Mountains. During the
Ukrainian–Soviet War Skrypnyk became a diplomatic courier for the army of the
Ukrainian People's Republic. He then served a second lieutenant (ensign) for special missions for Petliura. In the early 1920s he was
interned by
Poland in an
internment camp in
Kalisz. Later, he briefly settled in
Volhynia but had to leave under the pressure of the Polish authorities. He then moved to
Galicia and became an activist for the Ukrainian movement in
Poland which controlled the ethnically Ukrainian territories of
Galicia and
Volhynia between the world wars. Following his attendance of the Warsaw School of Political Sciences,
he was elected in 1930 to the
Polish Sejm from the Ukrainian population of Volhynia. He also served as vice-mayor of
Rivne in the 1930s. In this period Skrypnyk collaborated with the Polish
voivode of
Volhynia,
Henryk Józewski in his
Prometheist policies supporting moderate Ukrainians as a counterweight to Soviet communism. Serving in Sejm until 1939 Skrypnyk attained the reputation of the defender of the Ukrainian minority rights in Poland, especially of the
Orthodox Faith in the
predominantly Orthodox Volhynia against the
assimilationist policies of Polish authorities. At the beginning of the
Second World War, the Ukrainian life in
some Nazi-occupied territories of Poland initially experienced a significant degree of revival as the
Nazi policies played with pitting the ethnic groups with a
historically complicated relationship against each other, giving an upper hand to Poles or Ukrainians in different regions as the Nazis saw fit. When the Ukrainian Committee and the Temporary Church Council was formed in
Cholm (Chełm), Skrypnyk was elected a council deputy head (1940). In April 1942 Skrypnyk, by then a widower, entered the
priesthood. He took
monastic vows in the following month and soon after was
ordained (May 14) as the
Bishop Mstyslav of
Pereiaslav by the
Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC). The consecration took place in the
Church of St Andrew in Kyiv. In August 1942, the
German occupational authorities banned Mstyslav from Kyiv
General-Governorate. As Mstyslav disobeyed the order, he was arrested in
Rivne. On
Gestapo accusations he spent half a year imprisoned in
Chernihiv and
Pryluky. He was freed in spring the following year but was ordered not to leave Kyiv and banned from conducting religious services. In 1944 he moved to
Warsaw and later to Germany, where he was the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox eparchies in Hessen and Württemberg. In 1947 he left for Canada where he was elected the first resident
hierarch of the
Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church (UGOC) as an
archbishop of
Winnipeg. He left the UGOC due to conflict about the balance of power between the bishop and church administrators. The focal point of this conflict was between Mstyslav and Fr. Semen Sawchuk, who was the administrator of the UGOC consistory. In 1949 he moved to the USA and joined the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church in America (UOC in America), then headed by Bishop Bohdan (Shpyl'ka). At the 1950 Council (Sobor) in
New York City he succeeded in bringing about unification of the UOC in America with the much larger Archdiocese
eparchy of Archbishop John (Theodorovich), the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA (UOC of USA). Archbishop John was elected as Metropolitan of the newly united UOC of USA. Archbishop Mstyslav became his deputy and the head of the
Consistory. In the US, Bishop Mstyslav began extensive church activity with the Ukrainian Orthodox Center, a publishing house, library and seminary being built in
South Bound Brook, New Jersey. After the death of Metropolitan Nikanor (Abramovych) in 1969, his authority was extended over the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Churches of Europe and Australia. During his meetings with the then
Ecumenical Patriarch,
Athenagoras I both separately in 1963 and 1971, he brought up the issue of the canonical recognition of the Ukrainian Diaspora churches (UAOC was banned in the USSR, and hence in Soviet Ukraine at that time). In 1991, at the age of 93, he was elected
in absentia as the first Patriarch of Kyiv and all Ukraine of the
UAOC. He was enthroned as Patriarch Mstyslav I, on November 6, 1991 in
St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. In June 1992, a unification Sobor was held which united the UAOC with one part of the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), then led by Metropolitan
Filaret (Denysenko). Patriarch Mstyslav personally signed and affixed his seal to the merger documents, which formed the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyivan Patriarchate under his leadership, but the status of the new church as well as the overall situation with the Orthodox faith in Ukraine became a subject of the wide controversy (see
History of Christianity in Ukraine), which the patriarch was unable to resolve within his lifetime. Patriarch Mstyslav returned to North America, where on June 11, 1993 he died at his daughter's home in Canada at the age of 95. He was entombed at the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA center in
South Bound Brook, New Jersey. The issue of repatriating Mstyslav's relics to Ukraine is occasionally raised but no firm plans for this exist. After his death, the UOC-KP elected
Volodomyr (Romaniuk) as Patriarch, while a portion of the UAOC which had broken from the UAOC after the 1992 union elected Patriarch Dymytriy (Yarema) as a head of a newly formed UAOC. ==References==