Ukrainian Cardinal Lubomyr Husar

Ukrainian Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, who led the Ukrainian Catholic Church and earlier served as a pastor of a parish in Ulster County, died May 31 near Kiev, Ukraine. He was 84.

He served as pastor of Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic parish in Kerhonkson, 1966-1969.

His Funeral Mass was June 5 in Kiev.

Like many Ukrainian Catholics around the world, he knew what it meant to be a refugee, to spend time in a displaced persons’ camp, to immigrate and to start all over again.

The experiences also helped him become fluent in five languages, “and he could joke in all of them,” said Ukrainian Bishop Borys Gudziak of Paris.

And in a post-Soviet Ukraine, where leadership often meant “a compulsive passion” for money and power, “he lived in exemplary simplicity,” Bishop Gudziak told Catholic News Service June 1.

Born in Lviv in western Ukraine—then part of the Soviet Union, Lubomyr Husar fled Ukraine with his parents in 1944 ahead of the advancing Soviet army. He spent the early post-World War II years among Ukrainian refugees in a displaced persons’ camp near Salzburg, Austria. In 1949, as post-World War II displaced person, he immigrated with his family to the United States, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen.

They settled in Manhattan’s East Village, where many Ukrainians in German displaced persons camps came under a U.S. government refugee resettlement program.

The Husar family joined St. George’s Ukrainian Catholic parish on East Seventh Street, and young Lubomyr entered St. Basil’s Prep School of the Ukrainian Catholic Diocese in Stamford, Conn., to finish his secondary school education before going on to St. Basil College Seminary, where he began studies for the priesthood.

After St. Basil’s College Seminary in Stamford, he continued his studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He was ordained a priest of the Ukrainian Diocese of Stamford in 1958, the same year he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He celebrated his first Divine Liturgy in St. George’s Church.

Following his ordination, he earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Fordham University. From the time of his ordination until he left the U.S. for Rome in 1969, he served on the faculty of St. Basil’s Prep and Seminary.

He was elevated to cardinal Feb. 21, 2001.

Cardinal Husar saw a lack of ethical behavior and declining moral standards as a major problem at home and abroad, one that required a creative pastoral response. “Addressing the problem of morality is not a matter of reciting rules, rules, rules, but of helping people to do God’s will,” he told CNS in 2005.

Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, who succeeded Cardinal Husar as archbishop of Kiev-Halych and head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in 2011, cried as he spoke to reporters June 1 about the cardinal’s death.

“He was the spiritual father of the Ukrainian people, and today, in one moment, we became orphans,” Archbishop Shevchuk told the press. The cardinal was a “great man, great pastor, great Ukrainian.”

In a condolence message to Archbishop Shevchuk, Pope Francis recalled the cardinal’s “tenacious fidelity to Christ despite the deprivations and persecutions” suffered by the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which was forced into the underground by the communists.

“His fruitful apostolic activity to promote the organization of Greek Catholic faithful who were descendants of those forcibly transferred from Western Ukraine” and, simultaneously, his efforts to promote “dialogue and collaboration” with the Orthodox also were noted by the pope.

In Rome, Cardinal Husar earned a doctorate in dogmatic theology from the Pontifical Urbanian University in 1972 and joined the Ukrainian Studite monastic community.

He was ordained a bishop by Cardinal Josyf Slipyj in 1977 while the Church in Ukraine was still illegal and operating from exile in Rome.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, he returned to his native country and served as spiritual director of the newly re-established Holy Spirit Seminary in Lviv.

The synod of Ukrainian bishops elected him exarch of Kiev-Vyshhorod, a position he took up in 1996. Several months later, the synod elected him an auxiliary bishop with special delegated authority to assist Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky, the major archbishop of Lviv.

Cardinal Lubachivsky died in December 2000, and the next month the synod elected then-Bishop Husar to succeed him as head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. St. John Paul II made him a cardinal a month later.

Under his leadership and despite strong protests from the Russian Orthodox Church, in August 2005 Cardinal Husar established the major archiepiscopal see of Kiev-Halych and transferred the main Church offices to Ukraine’s capital.—CNS