LVIV – Iryna Kolomyets was born in 1949, the year her father, Stefan, was arrested for refusing to renounce his faith. When he returned from exile in Siberia seven years later, the KGB advised him to “disappear with his family.”
Years of living on the lam followed for the young Kolomyets.
Yet decades of seeing friends and loved ones risk their lives for their faith did little to steer Kolomyets away from Catholicism. In fact, her background has strengthened her resolve to honor the martyrs who were tortured and killed defending their religion.
Kolomyets, now head of the Pastoral Department at the Institute of Church History in Lviv, is part of a team trying to document the underground movement. Because there are no statistics for the period of repression and because KGB archives remain closed, interviewers are gleaning information from the tales of the more than 1,000 Catholic worshipers who survived the Soviet terror.
Since 1992, the institute has amassed close to 4,000 photographs of weddings, baptisms, Siberian huts and other glimpses of the underground church spanning the years from 1939 to 1989.
The photo and audio archives have helped researchers piece together how the underground movement was able to keep the church hierarchy intact despite fierce repression.
Kolomyets knows a little bit about it first hand. Her father was a priest of the Greek Catholic rite in western Ukraine, the one to which most Ukrainian Catholics belong. After Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin outlawed the Catholic Church in 1944, priests who did not convert to Orthodoxy were exiled, tortured or killed.
By 1947 the number of Catholic priests in Ukraine had decreased from 2,000 to a little more than 100.
The church survived, however, thanks to an underground network that preserved the faith for two generations until the Catholic Church was once again legalized in 1989 during glasnost. Today, Ukrainian Catholics number close to 4 million.
When Pope John Paul II visits Ukraine next month, he is scheduled to acknowledge the strength of Ukrainian believers by beatifying 27 martyrs from the Soviet era.
Between 1946 and 1989 the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was the largest banned church in the world. Although the Greek Catholic rite’s ceremonies are closer to Orthodox than Roman Catholicism, the church acknowledges the pope, not the Moscow or Kyiv Patriarchate, as its leader.
Volodymyr Senkivsky, one of the underground members interviewed by the institute, recalled his time in Siberia during an interview with the Post.
From a tiny cabinet in his living room, Senkivsky pulls out five objects: a handmade wooden wine goblet, a communion host, a small cloth, a prayer book made from paper packaging, and an embroidery of the Virgin Mary.
He keeps these relics to remind him of his time in Siberia where he was sent by Soviet authorities in 1948, 10 years after he became a priest.
His troubles began in 1941 when he discovered the murdered body of his elder brother, a monk named Yakiv. When Senkivsky learned his brother had been killed because of his beliefs, he did a bold thing: He said a prayer at his brother’s funeral. The prayer constituted a public declaration of his refusal to convert to Orthodoxy and a confirmation of his role as an “agent of the Vatican.” It was enough to have him exiled to Siberia.
Like Senkivsky, many of those who were persecuted didn’t allow themselves to be intimidated.
Catholic bishops Ivan Lyatyshevsky and Mykola Charnetsky returned from exile and appointed successors, keeping the hierarchical line intact. Lower clergy showed the same resilience and many priests, like Stefan Kolomyets, continued preaching even after their arrests.
The first thing Kolomyets did when he returned from exile was to open his church. He worked as an
Father Volodymyr Senkivsky, 92, a Catholic priest who defied the Soviet ban.
accountant while continuing to serve the faithful in the evenings and on weekends. When the authorities discovered his actions, he was forced to flee south to a small farming village near Zaporizhya.
Every morning Iryna Kolomyets and her four siblings attended a family service led by her father at a small altar set up in their house. When the family was allowed to return to Lviv in 1965, Stefan Kolomyets continued preaching, the daughter recalled.
“He sacrificed his life to God,” Iryna Kolomyets said.
He was not alone.
Hundreds of Catholic priests lived a double life, working as street cleaners, accountants and teachers during the day and praying with their secret congregations at night. They celebrated Masses, and held baptisms, weddings and confirmations in their homes. If discovered or turned in, the devout faced large fines and ostracism from society – while the priests faced exile, and their families, reprisal.
After Stefan Kolomyets was exiled, his wife, Maria, was denied work and ordered to give up her children to an orphanage. She refused and managed to pull through with the help of other priests and her husband’s parishioners.
Despite such high risk, young people continued to show interest in joining the order to become priests, and secret seminaries were set up to instruct them. Those unable to attend the hidden seminaries were trained individually by practicing priests like Senkivsky.
While in Siberia, Senkivsky celebrated a weekly Mass in a corner of his barracks. Despite laboring all day, Senkivsky and his fellow political prisoners would stay up every Sunday night praying. Over the years a young political prisoner named Pavlo Vasylyk began to help him with the Mass and eventually became his assistant. Today, Vasylyk is also a priest.
Pavlo was not Senkivsky’s only convert.
Senkivsky’s fellow political prisoners did all they could to help him keep his faith. One was Lev Gumilyov, the son of well-known Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov.
Senkivsky recalled how once, on the Virgin Mary’s holiday in May, he was supposed to perform hard labor, something his belief prohibits. Aware of the priest’s dilemma, Gumilyov invited Senkivsky to join his group of prisoners, a group that performed light work. The move allowed Senkivsky to work as an accountant, which was not forbidden by his church.
Still another prisoner, a schoolmaster too old to work himself, spent his days sitting in the barracks copying prayers into Senkivsky’s handmade prayer book. But Senkivsky said his favorite convert from the camp was a Jehovah’s Witness who embroidered him an image of the Virgin Mary using threads from his own scarf.
Stefan Kolomyets also had his converts.
His daughter said she still remembers the little boy her father baptized in Zaporizhya while they were living in the area and who later became her godson. Having lost her own godmother to Soviet repression, Kolomyets and her godson stayed strong in their faith, and the boy grew up to be a priest, today serving in Chernivtsy oblast.
Despite what they had to endure, the families of oppressed priests strive to continue the legacy of devotion. Senkivsky’s granddaughter, Natalya Senkivska, is in charge of the Institute of Church History’s photo archives. All of Stefan Kolomyets’ children remain devout
Although the priest died before he was able to see his church emerge from the underground and into the open after Ukrainian independence, his daughter thinks he would have been overjoyed by the pope’s upcoming visit.
And Senkivsky, who is 92 and nearly deaf, still tunes his short-wave radio to the Vatican station every Sunday.
When he thinks about his time in Siberia, he is not bitter.
“Thanks to the Bolsheviks, I met some of my closest friends,” the old priest said with a smile.