Gulag Martyr on Road to Sainthood

Born in 1877 in Galicia, he graduated from high school and served in the Austrian army before studying law at Lviv University. He then studied theology at the University of Innsbruck and was ordained a Ukrainian Catholic priest in 1905. After ordination he earned a doctorate in theology and became a seminary administrator at Lviv. In 1912, he was named a bishop. For the next sixteen years he served in Canada as Bishop for that country’s Ukrainian Catholics. In 1929 he returned to Lviv as auxiliary bishop. On April 14, 1945, he and several other bishops were arrested by Soviet authorities. He was sentenced to eight years in prison. He died in prison in 1949. In 2001, Pope John Paul II beatified Bishop Budka as a martyr.