
CV NEWS FEED // The Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Kiev, Svjatoslav Ševchuk, has announced the start of his predecessor’s process of beatification, a US-educated Bishop who played a key role in the revival of Catholicism in post-Soviet Ukraine.
Bishop Ševchuk “solemnly proclaimed” the news on the 91st anniversary of Archbishop Ljubomyr Husar’s birth, according to a recent AsiaNews report, emphasising how “the strength of [Husar’s] word and his spirit have continued to serve as orientation and support for people in daily life, especially in the days of the terrible war we are experiencing.”
AsiaNews stated in the report:
The collection of documentation for the trial began with the many requests from the people and communities of Ukrainian believers, reporting directly to the archeparchy of the Greek Catholic Church, which has the ex officio faculty over the canonical procedures of its jurisdiction, to which it reports following the competent Vatican departments.
Cardinal and Archbishop Husar was born in Lviv in 1933. His family fled to Austria in 1944, and a few years later to the United States, where he attended seminary and was ordained for the Eparchy of Stamford, Connecticut for Ukrainians in 1958.
Husar began his life as a priest in New York, where he taught in a seminary and ministered to a local parish in Kerhonkson. He went on to earn a doctorate degree in theology from the Pontifical Urbanian University in Rome, where he joined the Studite Monks and served as superior.
Husar founded the Monastery of Saint Theordore Studite in Ternopil, Ukraine in 1994, a community which currently consists of 22 members. In 2001, Husar was appointed Major Archbishop of Lviv by Pope St. John Paul II, during which, AsiaNews pointed out, was “one of the most delicate phases,” for the Church in Ukraine, as “the country’s fate remained in the balance between conflicting forces of politics and the ecclesiastical life of Catholics and Orthodox.”
The report concluded:
Everyone remembers him as a man of profound wisdom and capacity for dialogue, who was able to transmit the truths about the nature of the Church, which he taught for years at the Urbaniana University, not as chapters of an abstract doctrine, but as experiences of life and of rebirth of faith, after much suffering and persecution, to prepare to face many other trials of history.
Husar eventually participated in the conclave which elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2006. He died on May 31, 2017.
