Жезлъ твой и палица твоѧ, та мя оутѣшиста.
Thy crook and thy staff have comforted me. (Psalm 22/23)
As I near the end of a research project, my friend and colleague Gloria Romaniuk, Archivist of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Winnipeg, sent me a photo, for which I had been searching for a long time. It came from a collection belonging to the late Bishop Michael Hrynchyshyn, CSsR, longtime postulator of the cause of beatification of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. He received the photo from Dr. Pavlo Senytsia, alumnus of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Theological Academy in Lviv, and editor of a multi-volume collection of articles regarding that institution. The second and third volume of this work, entitled "Світильник Істини" (Beacon of Truth) contains a partial reconstruction of the story of this famous cane. I have used these and other sources in my work on Sheptytsky, which includes articles regarding his apprenticeship of two priests, each of which, at one time, he looked upon as his successor. Each one of them was to receive this cane as a symbolic gift, in dramatic and perilous circumstances of the First and later of the Second World War.
Who did Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky look upon as his successor? Above
all, he was looking for a someone who understood and was dedicated to
his principal cause: promoting the union of the Orthodox Churches with Rome or,
as he referred to it, “la Cause de l’Union.” During his long term as
Metropolitan of Lviv-Halych, he considered several possibilities, among which
was his own brother, Hieromonk Klymenti. However, above all others, two members
of his clergy stood out for their moral and intellectual gifts, each of whom,
at one time, the Metropolitan looked upon as a successor. Both men bore the
same Christian name, Yosyf (Joseph). Both were chosen by Kyr Andrey to educate
and form his clergy, as rector of his Major Seminary. Both were gifted academic
theologians that had studied in Innsbruck and Vienna (and Rome). These men were
Yosyf Botsian (1879–1926) and Yosyf Slipyi (1892–1984).
Father Botsian was the first to receive the cane, during the First
World War, when he was accompanying Metropolitan Andrey to Kyiv. Sheptytsky had
been arrested by Russian Imperial authorities, when they invaded Austrian
Galicia and captured Lemberg (Lviv), in
September 1914. He was deported to Kyiv and destined to spend the rest
of the war in Russian confinement, at one point in a prison monastery for
religious dissidents. The Tsarist authorities allowed three ecclesiastics to
accompany him on the first part of his journey. These were Father Yosyf
Botsian, the seminary rector, Father Dmytro Yaremko (1879–1915), the
vice-rector, and Brother Yosyf Grodsky, the Metropolitan’s valet. They arrived
in Kyiv and were confined at the city’s Hotel Continental.
In 1908, Kyr Sheptytsky had received special powers from Pope Pius
X, confirming him as administrator of all Uniate eparchies that had been
uncanonically suppressed by the Russian State, from 1772 to 1875. Among these
powers was the right to ordain bishops for these dormant sees. After arriving
in Kyiv, He spent several days in intense reflection and prayer. Fearing
for the survival of the Greek-Catholic Church, Sheptytsky decided to make use
of the special powers to ordain Botsian and Yaremko to the episcopacy. By virtue
of the same faculties, he assigned them the suppressed bishoprics of Lutsk and
Ostrih.
Botsian and Yaremko were deported to Siberia the following year. Yaremko did not survive his Siberian confinement, whereas Bostian’s health was ruined by it. Forced by illness to resign as rector in 1919, Botsian was never permitted to take possession of his eparchy. The Second Polish Republic, which had occupied Volyn and its capital Lutsk, imposed an invisible barrier (known as the Sokal Border) prohibiting Greek-Catholics from ministering east of the Lviv-Halych Metropolia. Shortly before Kyr Botsian's untimely death, Father Slipyi, who had been made rector in 1925, invited him to move to the Lviv Seminary, while quarters at the canons’ residence near Saint George’s Archcathedral were being prepared. On 21 November 1926, Slipyi administered the Sacrament of Holy Anointing to Botsian, whom he discovered lifeless, sitting in a chair in the seminary corridor. The following day, Slipyi preached a farewell sermon. The the funeral, which was the largest that Lviv had witnessed in many years. Writing to the Nuncio tweek weeks later, Slipyi commented: “We all regret the death of Bishop Botsian, because it is a great loss for our Church and a weakening of its situation.”
In 1939, Yosyf Slipyi began his own episcopal ministry as a
clandestine bishop. Like Botsian, his nomination remained secret for just a
little over two years and did not appear in any official church publication.
After sending a personal courier to Rome, Metropolitan Andrey received word indicating
that that Pope Pius XII had acceded to his request for a successor. In a
letter, written in code, Cardinal Eugène Tisserant told the Metropolitan: “you
may consider Your beloved disciple to be Your coadjutor and successor. You may
proceed to make him such with the necessary function.” In other words, he could
go ahead with the episcopal consecration. Describing the ceremony, Slipyi later wrote to a friend in
Switzerland:
In place of a bishop’s crozier I received the Metropolitan’s wooden
walking staff which, already once in Kyiv, he had given to Bishop Yosyf
Botsian, of blessed memory, as a shepherds crozier, and also the same episcopal
ring and the same hieratikon [that he had give Botsian]. These items had been
rescued, in a very mysterious way, before the Bolsheviks destroyed the Major
Seminary. In this, I specifically perceived the hand of Divine Providence.
Metropolitan Andrey intended this deliberate gesture to contain
various layers of meaning: it symbolized that Slipyi was following in Botsian’s
footsteps as Sheptytsky’s chosen successor; it also signified that, as Botsian
had been consecrated secretly in emergency circumstances, so too Slipyi was
being called to exercise his episcopal ministry in hardship and peril. This
symbolic act was a clear indication that the “torch” had (literally) been
passed from Botsian to Slipyi.
In a letter to Pope Benedixt XV in 1917, Sheptytsky had himself observed that it was that very Hand of Divine Providence which had freed him and
Bostian from Siberia and brought down the mighty colossus, which had held the Uniate Churches captive for centuries. However, Providence also decreed
that Slipyi was destined to share in many aspects of his predecessors’ fates. After
having served 8 years in prison, he was exiled to Yenissey and
Krasnoyarsk in Siberia where, almost forty years before, Bishop Botsian had
been held. Following eighteen years in the Gulag, upon his elevation to the sacra
porpora in 1965, Cardinal Yosyf Slipyi paid tribute to the earlier Father
Yosyf who, but by the same mysterious Providence, might have taken his place as
Metropolitan Andrey’s successor.
