Early life and education He was born as
Count Roman Aleksander Maria Szeptycki in
Prylbychi, a village 40 km west/northwest of
Lviv, in the
Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then a
crownland of the
Austrian Empire. His parents were and
Zofia née Fredro. Sheptytsky likely spoke about his desire to bring Russia to Catholicism during his audience with Pope Leo XIII in 1888, and it was one of the factors that influenced his decision to become an Eastern Catholic despite his family's Polish and Latin Church background. A monk who later became his aide wrote in 1933 that Sheptytsky "never turned his eyes away from the conversion of Russia."
Religious and political life Sheptytsky became a
novice at the
Basilian monastery in
Dobromyl on May 29, 1888. He took the name Andrey, after the younger brother of
Saint Peter,
Andrew the Apostle, considered the founder of the
Byzantine Church and also specifically of the
Ukrainian Church. Beginning in 1889, he studied Ukrainian there under . (now
Ivano-Frankivsk), and
Pope Leo XIII concurred. Thus he was
consecrated as bishop in Lviv on 17 September 1899 by Metropolitan
Julian Sas-Kuilovsky assisted by Bishop Chekhovych and Bishop Weber, the Latin-Rite auxiliary of Lviv. On February 5 of that year, he received a doctorate in theological sciences in Rome, nostrified at the Faculty of Theology of the Jagiellonian University. attended the twenty-first
International Eucharistic Congress in
Montreal; toured
Ukrainian communities in
Canada; and invited the
Redemptorist fathers ministering in the Byzantine rite to come to Ukraine. In the spring of 1914, the Austrian government lobbied for the Holy See to make Sheptytsky a cardinal, but this was not done.
World War I After the outbreak of
World War I, Sheptytsky proposed eventual creation of the Ukrainian state out of the Russian territories, he also appealed to believers to stay loyal to the emperor of Austria. While staying there he tried to recreate the
Union by consecrating Josyf Botsyan as bishop of
Lutsk. During the destruction the family archives were lost. In 1921 he was appointed
apostolic visitor by the
Pope, representing
Vatican before the
Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations tasked with aiding orphans and other victims of the recent war. In the United States the metropolitan had an audience with president
Warren G. Harding and met with Ukrainian diplomats, voicing his opposition to the annexation of
Eastern Galicia to
Poland. As a result, Polish authorities started collecting compromising information against Sheptytskyi and the Polish press declared him a traitor, despite the fact that the metropolitan's own brother Stanisław was serving as the country's defence minister during that time. Fearing Sheptytskyi's influence in Galicia, Polish authorities offered the Vatican to appoint him to a position in Rome or in North America. Nevertheless, Sheptytskyi took a decision to return, an in August 1923 crossed the Polish border. Immediately thereafter he was arrested and spent six weeks isolated in
Poznań. Finally, after a meeting with Polish president
Stanisław Wojciechowski, the metropolitan was allowed to proceed to Lviv, where he arrived in early October. Between 1923 and 1935 Sheptytskyi sponsored an art school in Lviv, which was established by painter
Oleksa Novakivskyi and employed notable Ukrainian artists including
Osyp Kurylas, Stepan Baley, Ivan Rakovskyi,
Yevhen Nahirnyi, Volodymyr Peshchanskyi, Volodymyr Zalozetskyi and
Ilarion Svientsitskyi. Twice a month, the metropolitan himself gave lectures at the establishment.
World War II After the
German invasion of Poland, Sheptytsky issued a pastoral letter appealing not to succumb to propaganda. On October 9, 1939, after the Soviets took over eastern Poland, without the consent of the Holy See, he created a new territorial division of the Greco-Catholic Church on the territory of the USSR. He reportedly told
Volodymyr Kubiyovych, who was helping organize it, that "there is virtually no price which should not be paid for the creation of a Ukrainian army." According to his close friend
Rabbi David Kahane, however, Sheptytsky had believed that the Division would be used to fight
Stalinism and personally expressed disgust in a conversation with the Rabbi about the Division's subsequent role as perpetrators of the
Holocaust in Ukraine. Also in February 1942, Sheptytsky sent a letter to Heinrich Himmler protesting the Holocaust. to protest
Nazi atrocities. According to historian
Ronald Rychlak, "A
German Foreign Office agent named 'Frederic' was sent in a tour through various Nazi-occupied and satellite countries during the war. He wrote in his confidential report to the German Foreign Office on September 19, 1943, that Metropolitan Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky, of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, remained adamant in saying that the killing of Jews was an inadmissible act. 'Frederic' went on to comment that Sheptytsky made the same statements and used the same phrasing as the French, Belgian, and Dutch bishops, as if they were all receiving instructions from
the Vatican." One of the rabbis whose life was saved by Metropolitan Sheptytsky,
David Kahane, stated: "Andrew Sheptytsky deserves the undying gratitude of the Jews and the honorific title 'Prince of the Righteous'". In addition, among the Jews who, thanks to Sheptytsky's help, survived the war were
Lili Pohlmann and her mother,
Adam Daniel Rotfeld (later Poland's foreign minister), two sons of the
chief rabbi of
Katowice (including the prominent cardiac surgeon Leon Chameides). In March 1946, during the so-called "
Lviv Synod", it was officially declared part of the
Russian Orthodox Church, forcing millions of its members to continue their worship in the underground. == Views ==