Bl. Vasyl Velychkovsky

Vasyl Velychkovsky was born in 1903 in Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk), Ukraine. At fifteen he fought in the Ukrainian war of independence. He then entered the seminary in Lviv, joined the Redemptorists and was ordained a priest in 1925.

Under Soviet rule he was arrested in 1945 and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to ten years in labour camps. Afterwards he returned to Lviv and worked in secret, and in 1963 he was secretly consecrated a bishop in a hotel room.

He was arrested again in 1969 and sentenced to three years in prison. In 1972 he was expelled from the Soviet Union. He went to Rome, where Paul VI received him, and then to Winnipeg in Canada, where he died in 1973. John Paul II beatified him in 2001.

Legend and tradition. Santi e Beati reports that an autopsy found a slow-acting poison, given to him before his expulsion.

Vasyl Velychkovsky was beatified in 2001.

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