VYROK-Sentence in the name of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Fr. Kotliarchuk with his wife Sofia and children Khrystyna and Bohdan in exile in the Dzhonko Khabarivskyi area, 1953.
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Nevertheless, the Church continued to live and to develop in the underground. Undoubtedly, the late 1940s _ early 1950s were the most difficult period in activities of the UGCC. A visible structure of the Church was totally destroyed by arrests of the bishops, implantation of the official orthodoxy, and repression against unruliness. Besides the bishops, the soviet power repressed many priests and faithful.
In 1947 Hryhoriy Tchomyshyn, the Bishop of Stanislaviv, and Yosafat Kotsylowsky, the Bishop of Peremyshl, died in Kyiv prison. Inhumane conditions of life in camps and old age led to death in exile of Bishop Mykyta Budka, the general vicar of the Lviv archeparchy (Karaganda, 1949), and Hryhoriy Lakota, the Auxiliary Bishop of Peremyshl (the village of Abez near Workuta, 1950). After 18 years of captivity (1845-1963) the Head of the Church Metropolitan Iosyf Slipyi was released to attend Vatican II due to promote of the Pope Joann XIII. |
