Venerable Andrey Sheptytsky

I have, in this article, been sharing some thoughts about one of the great leaders of our Church,     Metropolitan Sheptytsky. I shared how he courageously dared to protest to the leaders of Nazism about their treatment of Jews. A

Vatican official, Hansjakob Stehle, was to write later that Sheptytsky “had to be respected [by the Germans] because he had already been imprisoned in tsarist Russia and Poland”.  It would seem that Sheptytsky was not only saved by his being an “old” man. Himmler had ordered the death of many an old man before. Sheptytsky however, was a particularly difficult case. Prior to his entry to the priesthood, he had been an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army; he was also a Count who had held position and favor among the families of the Habsburg Empire. As Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church he had enjoyed the personal high esteem of Emperor Fransz Josef. He held a   similar sentiment for the Emperor.

Sheptytsky was loved passionately by his Ukrainian Greek-Catholic faithful and highly respected by the Orthodox. To harm Sheptytsky would have thus made the position of the “liberating” German forces in the East completely untenable.

In August 1942, confident of Sheptytsky’s sensitivity to the plight of the Jewish people, Rabbi Kahane   entrusted to him the Scrolls of the Torah. Sheptytsky, by way of couriers of “undercover clergy” sent a note to Rome in which he described the horrors of the Nazi clearing of the L’viv ghetto.

Most of Sheptytsky’s rescuing of Jewish citizens was to take place in a period from August 1942 to May 1943. During this time the Metropolitan was able to build up a solid network of approximately 250 Ukrainian Greek-Catholic clergy, each of whom risked martyrdom for their involvement in a scheme to rescue Jewish citizens. Sheptytsky ordered that false baptismal certificates and also Ukrainian names be given to Jewish children, who were then secreted to Ukrainian Greek-Catholic orphanages, monasteries and convents.

The Director of Holocaust studies at Ben Gurion University, Shimon Redlich has emphasized that no         attempt was made by Sheptytsky’s assistants to convert the rescued Jewish children, and after, when the war was over, they were returned to the Jewish community”. Redlich wrote that the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Order of Studite monks assisted countless Jews across the borders into Romania and Hungary. I think that it is important to know this about our Church!