SZEPTYCKYJ, ANDREJ. – Metropolitan of Galicia, secular name Roman Aleksander, third son of Counts de Szeptyci-Szeptyckyj, an ancient Ukrainian noble family, b. at Prylybyci on 29 July 1865, d. 1 November 1944. After completing legal studies at Breslau, crowned by a doctorate in jurisprudence, he entered the Basilian Order on 23 May 1888, taking the name Andrej.
SZEPTYCKYJ Andrěj – SZOMBATHELY
faithful who, due to grave social conditions, were forced to emigrate overseas to North and South America. The metropolitan personally visited these destitute people, sent priests to them, and through his great zeal merited obtaining from the Apostolic See the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the United States of America (1907) and in Canada (1912). Having embraced the monastic state, Msgr. S., even as metropolitan, nonetheless remained an exemplary religious and promoter of monastic life.
Beginning with the restoration of the nuns of St Basil the Great, he renewed ancient Eastern monasticism according to the Rule of St Theodore the Studite (1901–1902). Then, while visiting his faithful in Canada on the occasion of the Eucharistic Congress of 1910–11, he found some Redemptorists who, having obtained faculties from the Holy See, were devoting themselves to the pastoral care of the faithful of the Byzantine-Slav rite. He then concluded an agreement with the Redemptorist Superior General (1913), later confirmed by the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide on 27 April 1914, by virtue of which the Redemptorists established a branch of the Congregation in the Byzantine-Slav rite. Today this branch has already become a province in Galicia, unfortunately now suppressed by the Bolsheviks; another flourishing vice-province exists in Canada and the United States of America.
But the most noble purpose that governed all the metropolitan’s activity was his desire to promote the union of dissidents with the Holy See of Rome, and he left no opportunity untried to achieve II. To this end he visited Latin bishops and religious Orders, discussing difficult problems of the Union and encouraging collaboration; he frequently took part in unionist congresses, undertook journeys to Moscow (1907), and fostered relations with the most important dissident ecclesiastical and civil figures. This enabled the metropolitan, freed from imprisonment in 1917 after the Russian Revolution, to hold a provincial synod of Catholics with already known priests and to secure the appointment of an exarch for Russia in the person of Leonid Fedorov (cf. A. Herman, De fontibus iuris ecclesiastici Russorum, Rome 1936, pp. 96 ff.). Because of this zealous activity in promoting the unionist cause, in 1914, after the occupation of Galicia by Russian troops, he was taken “prisoner of the Tsar” and then imprisoned in the Suzdal monastery for more than two years. The Russian Revolution of 1917 freed the metropolitan from prison. In September of the same year he returned to his homeland, devastated and destroyed by the great battles that had taken place in eastern Galicia. Once he had rebuilt the burned churches, renewed the ecclesiastical institutions that had been destroyed and plundered, and organized the minor and major seminaries and restored studies during the laborious years 1918–39, the Second World War arrived. During the war, when his ecclesiastical province was occupied, the metropolitan devoted his final efforts to defending his flock and wrote pastoral letters encouraging priests and faithful to resist and persevere in the Catholic faith; on 2 May 1940 he celebrated a diocesan synod in Lviv.