Andrew Szepticky

Writing in the issues of this review for July 1944 and April 1945, I tried to explain the extremely complex set-up of peoples and Christian allegiances in the borderland that stretches from Lithuania to the Carpathians: that territory which was part of Poland-Lithuania from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, was partitioned between Russia and Austria in 1795, became Polish again from 1921 to 1939, and is now incorporated in the U.S.S.R. The inhabitants of the southernmost part, eastern Galicia (Galych, Halicz), are about one-third Latin Catholic Poles to three-fifths Ruthenians, i.e., Byzantine Catholic Ukrainians; and of these last I wrote that it seemed likely, in view of the circumstances and of historical precedent, that the Soviet authorities would seek to force them into the Russian Orthodox Church. Actually that process had already begun: in April 1945 all the Galician Ukrainian bishops were arrested and deported into Russia, and in March 1946 a handful of lower clergy and laity, calling themselves 'The Synod of the Uniate Church in the Western Ukraine', reported to Marshal Stalin that the 350-year old reunion with Rome was revoked. It can hardly be doubted that the signal for this move was the death on the preceding November 1st of the archbishop of Lvov, Andrew Szepticky, who had not only been for forty-four years head of the Catholic Ukrainian church but for long the most respected and most loved of all Ukrainian public figures anywhere

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