Andrey Sheptytsky, OSBM (; ; 29 July 1865 – 1 November 1944) was the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Lviv and Metropolitan of Halych from 1901 until his death in 1944. His tenure in office spanned two world wars and seven political regimes: Austrian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Soviet, Nazi German, and again Soviet.
According to the church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, "Arguably, Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky was the most influential figure ...in the entire history of the Ukrainian Church in the twentieth century". The Lviv National Museum, founded by Sheptytsky in 1905, now bears his name.
The Information-Resource Center of the Ukrainian Catholic University that was opened in September 2017 also bears his name The Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Center.
Life
Early life and education
He was born as Count Roman Aleksander Maria Szeptycki in a village 40 km west/northwest of Lviv called Prylbychi, in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then a crownland of the Austrian Empire. His parents were and Zofia née Fredro.
The Szeptycki family descends from the Ruthenian nobility, but in the 18th century had become Polish-speaking and Catholic. The maternal Fredro family descends from the Polish nobility.The Szeptycki family produced a number of bishops of both Catholic rites, most notably in the 18th century. Greek Catholic Bishops of Lviv and Metropolitans of Kiev were: Athanasius and Leo, was also bishop of Lviv. was a Greek Catholic bishop of Przemyśl and Nikifor was archimanrite of Lavriv. The Latin Catholic Bishop of Płock was , while his nephew Marcin was elected to the position, but did not take it. His maternal grandfather was the Polish writer Aleksander Fredro. One of his brothers, Klymentiy Sheptytsky, M.S.U., became a Studite monk, and another, Stanisław Szeptycki, became a General in the Polish Army. He was 2 m 10 cm (6 ft. 10 in.) tall.
Sheptytsky was baptized in the Roman rite at the parish church in Bruchnal (today ). Sheptytsky received his education first at home and then in Lviv and later in Kraków. His confessor was Jesuit , who was carrying out the reform of the Greek Catholic Basilian Order in Galicia. Probably under his influence, Sheptyskiy made the decision to join the Basilians, which, however, provoked opposition from his father. Hence in 1883 he went to serve in the Austro-Hungarian Army but after a few months he fell sick and was forced to abandon it.
Instead, he went to study law in Breslau. There he was a member of the Literary and Slavic Society run by , as well as the Upper Silesian Society and the Polish Academicians' Reading Room. With his brother Alexander, he founded the Polish-Catholic Student Theological Society "Societas Hosiana" in 1884. From the 1885/6 academic year, he continued his studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, at which time he changed his nationality declaration from "Polish" to "Ruthenian". In April and May 1886 he visited Rome. From November to December 1887 he stayed in Kyiv and then in Moscow. Together with mother and brother Leone he was granted an audience on March 24, 1888, with Pope Leo XIII at the Vatican. Pope blessed his intention to join Basilians. On May 19, 1888 he received doctorate.
According to his biographer Fr. Cyril Korolevsky, Sheptytsky's lifelong dream of creating the Russian Greek Catholic Church as a means of reuniting the Russian people with the Holy See goes back at least to his first trip to Russia in 1887. Afterwards, Sheptytsky "wrote some reflections" between October and November 1887, and expressed his belief, "that the Great Schism, which became definitive in Russia in the fifteenth century, was a bad tree, and it was useless to keep cutting the branches without uprooting the trunk itself, because the branches would always grow back."
Religious and political life
Sheptytsky became a novice at the Basilian monastery in Dobromyl on June 2, 1888. He took the name, Andrew, 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 . He then studied at the , passing the exam in 1894. On September 3, 1892 he was ordained a priest in Przemyśl. He was made hegumen of the Monastery of St Onuphrius in Lviv in 1896. In 1898, he took up the post of professor of moral and dogmatic theology at the Basilian seminary in Krystynopol. There he founded the Studite Order, based on the rule of St. Theodore the Studite.