Bl. Klymentiy Sheptytsky

Kazimierz Sheptytsky was born in 1869 at Prylbychi, near Lviv, into a noble family; he was the younger brother of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. He earned a doctorate in law and sat in the Austrian parliament, but in 1907 he left politics.

He joined the Studite monks, an Eastern Catholic monastic order, taking the name Klymentiy, and was ordained a priest in 1915. From 1926 he led the monastery at Univ, and he became archimandrite, a senior monastic rank, in 1944. During the Second World War, with his brother's blessing, he hid many Jews in monasteries to save them from the Gestapo.

In 1947 the Soviet authorities sentenced him to eight years in labour camps. He died in Vladimir prison in Russia on May 1, 1951. John Paul II beatified him in 2001 with twenty-four other Ukrainian Greek Catholic martyrs.

Klymentiy Sheptytsky was beatified in 2001.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.