Pope honours Ukrainian archbishop who saved Jews

Late head of Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Andrey SheptytskyVatican Radio

The Venerable Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky

By News from Elsewhere...
...as found by BBC Monitoring

Pope Francis I has honoured a Ukrainian Catholic archbishop who saved scores of Jews from the Nazi Holocaust.

He included Andrey Sheptytsky among eight people to be granted the title of "Venerable" for his "life of heroic virtue" - widely seen in Catholic circles as the first step towards sainthood, Ukraine's Den newspaper reports.

Archbishop Sheptytsky, born 150 years ago, was Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the city of Lviv from 1900 until his death in 1944. Like many, he initially welcomed the Germans as liberators when they drove out the Soviet occupiers in 1941, but soon began to use his pulpit to publicly denounce Nazi tyranny. He urged fellow priests to shelter as many Jews as they could from deportation and death, and personally gave refuge to at least 160 Jewish children. The hundreds of other children who survived hidden in Greek Catholic monasteries include Adam Daniel Rotfeld, a future foreign minister of Poland.

The archbishop is an iconic figure for many in Ukraine, uniting Christians and Jews in admiration of his courage in defying Tsarist, Polish, Soviet and German oppression, but earlier efforts to have him made a saint were stalled by Cold War tensions, reports the Jewish Tablet online magazine. And a campaign to have him recognised in Israel as "Righteous Among the Nations" for his work in saving Jewish lives has foundered over concerns about his initial support for the Nazis and their Ukrainian allies.

The Pope and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church highlighted Metropolitan Sheptytsky's work for Christian unity in the country, and many observers see it as an "olive branch" to the majority Orthodox Church, Tablet says. Fr Peter Galadza of the Sheptytsky Institute certainly agrees, telling the Catholic News Agency that it is particularly consoling for Ukraine at a time of "foreign aggression" - a reference to the Russian-backed insurgency in the east of the country.

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