Those espousing the subversive doctrines of socialism and communism – which includes almost every Democrat presidential candidate, Liberals in Canada, almost the entirety of the ‘BLM’ movement, our university campuses, and whose insidious tendrils have even infected any number of the rest of us – should ponder the sufferings of two hardy and courageous bishops we celebrate today, who saw its evils first-hand, and who stood fast courageously, unto death.
Blessed Vasyl Velykchovsky (+1973) was a Ukrainian priest and later bishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. A devout and holy man, he joined the Redemptorists in 1920, and spend a quarter of a century in a very active and fruitful sacerdotal ministry, until his arrest in 1945 by the NKVD for ‘anti-Soviet’ activities. Father Vasyl’s sentence of death was commuted to ten years of hard labour. After his release, he was ordained a bishop in 1963, before being imprisoned again six years later, during which he was tortured, physically and chemically. His body broken and approaching his well-lived three score and ten, he was exiled in 1972, arriving in Winnipeg, where there was a community of Eastern Catholics, and here the good bishop and martyr died on June 30, 1973.
Thirty years after his death, his body was found incorrupt, and rests in the beautiful shrine dedicated to him in the city of Winnipeg, not far from downtown, which I had the privilege of visiting, with a private guided tour, on a road trip across Canada in her sesquicentennial year. Well worth the drive, and may the good bishop intercede for his adopted and beleaguered country.