Josyf Slipyi (, born as ; 17 February 1892 – 7 September 1984) was a Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and a cardinal of the Catholic Church.
Life
Genealogy
Josyf Slipyj's father, Joannes (Ivan) Slipyj, was born 19 May 1846 in Zazdrist (Polish: ) into a family of local Ukrainian farmers. His mother was Anastasia Dychkovska (born 27 January 1850), the daughter of Roman Dychkovski and Barbara Janisiewicz, also from Zazdrist. Both clans were well rooted in the village and can be traced there as far back as existing records allow. Interestingly, but not uncommon, one of Cardinal Josyf's great grandfathers, Adalberti Slominski, was of the Roman Catholic (Latin) rite. Cardinal Slipyj's older sister, Francisca, was also baptized in the Latin-rite by Rev. Martinus Serwacki on 17 February 1875. At the time the family was living at house #75, Zazdrist.
Early years
Josyf Slipyj was born in the village of Zazdrist (Terebovlia povit), Galicia (in modern Ternopil Oblast), then a crownland of Austria-Hungary. Unlike most Ukrainian Catholic priests at the time, Josyf Slipy did not come from a sacerdotal family, which was considered an elite, educated caste among Ukrainians, but had common roots instead. As a teen Josyf studied at the gymnasium in Ternopil and then at the Lviv Greek-Catholic Seminary and Innsbruck University in Austria, before being ordained a priest on 30 June 1917. From 1920 to 1922, he studied in Rome at the Pontifical Oriental Institute, the Collegio Angelico (Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum), and the Pontifical Gregorian University. He returned to Lwów (Lviv), by then part of Second Polish Republic.
After a short pastoral assignment, in 1922 Slipyi became a professor of dogmatic theology at the Lviv Holy Spirit Seminary. In 1926 he became the rector of the seminary and actively participated in its development. In 1923 he established the Theological Academic Society, for which he wrote the articles of association and enrolled scholars. In the same year, he became an editor of the quarterly Bohosloviia (Theology). On 14 April 1929 Slipyi became the first rector of the Lviv Theological Academy (the predecessor to the Ukrainian Catholic University).
In 1926, Slipyj became a member of the supervisory board of the Lviv National Museum, and in 1931 Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian Catholic Union. Due to his scholarly merits and active development of Ukrainian cultural and religious life, Slipyi became a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. At this time he made numerous research trips to Western Europe, Holy Land, took part in union congresses in Velegrad, Prague, Pinsk and 1936 he organized a union congress in Lviv.
Soviet and Nazi occupation
On 22 December 1939, with the blessing of Pope Pius XII, Slipyj was ordained archbishop of Serrae and Coadjutor Archbishop of Lviv with the right of succession. The ordination was conducted by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky in secrecy due to the Soviet presence and the political situation.
On 30 June 1941, Josyf Slipyj supported the Act of Declaration of Ukrainian State. Slipyj became the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church on 1 November 1944, following Sheptytsky's death.
After Soviet troops captured Lviv, Slipyj was arrested along with other bishops in 1945 by the NKVD, convicted to penal servitude, allegedly for collaboration with the Nazi regime. This was the first step in the planned liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church by Soviet authorities. After being jailed in Lviv, Kyiv, and Moscow, he was sentenced by a Soviet court to eight years of hard labor in the Siberian Gulag.
At this time Soviet authorities forcibly convened an assembly of 216 priests, and on 9 March 1946 and the following day, the so-called "Synod of Lviv" was held in St. George's Cathedral. The Union of Brest, the council at which the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church formally entered into ecclesiastic communion with the Holy See, was revoked. The Church was forcibly "rejoined" to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Slipyj rejected any offers of conversion into Orthodoxy and was continuously sentenced in 1953, 1957, 1962, thus totally imprisoned for 18 years in camps in Siberia and Mordovia (Dubravlag in Potma). Slipyj spent five years in Maklakovo (Krasnoyarsk region), where he wrote a multi-volume history of the Catholic Church in Ukraine.