This excerpt, part of a chapter on Bishop Schneider’s personal relationships with persecuted Christians and martyrs, recounts his early encounters with Blessed Oleksiy Zaritskiy. Bl. Oleksiy’s heroic dedication to faith, family, and virtue under severe persecution provides a vivid example of living the Christian life through courage, sacrifice, and unwavering trust in God.
Bl. Oleksiy Zaritskiy (1912–1963)
As a child, living in the Soviet Union, I had, through my parents, an indirect contact with a martyr priest, Blessed Oleksiy Zaritskiy. He was a Ukrainian Greek-Catholic priest from the archdiocese of Lviv. He had been for several years the confessor of my parents in the underground church in the Ural Mountains, during the years 1950−1960. He baptized my elder siblings and blessed me when I was lying in the cradle (before his arrival I had already been baptized by my mother and later additionally by an underground Lithuanian Jesuit priest). Blessed Fr. Oleksiy suffered horribly in several Communist prisons and Gulags in Siberia merely for refusing to deny his Catholic faith, since he was asked to join the Russian Orthodox Church. The Communist authorities released him several years after the death of Stalin, when the severity of the persecution had receded a little bit. However, he was treated by the authorities as a persona non grata. For instance, he was refused a residence permit several times in various places. He was forced to live for a time as a homeless person. The Catholics, who loved him so much, lovingly named him “the vagabond of God.” Yet in the midst of all this discrimination and these difficulties, Bl. Fr. Oleksiy developed an intense and heroic apostolate in the underground church, being aware that, at any moment, the Communist authorities could arrest and later kill him. He died in 1963 in a Gulag near Karaganda in Kazakhstan because of the bad conditions in the prison. He was beatified in 2001 as a martyr together with other Ukrainian martyrs. My parents spoke of him very frequently and told me that they had never met in their whole lives a holier priest than Fr. Oleksiy.
Heroic Apostolic Zeal
What impressed my parents so greatly was the heroic apostolic zeal of Bl. Oleksiy Zaritskiy. In the exteriorly dangerous and uncomfortable circumstances of the underground church, in little rooms with no windows, at times in a suffocating atmosphere, he spent whole nights hearing confessions. He celebrated with exactness and devotion the Holy Mass in Latin, in the Roman Rite (though he was a Greek-Catholic priest of the Byzantine Rite). He preached the fundamental truths of the Catholic faith. He often repeated these words: “Let us keep faithfully the Faith of our forefathers.” Precious are the following quotations from the letters of Bl. Oleksiy, revealing to us his deep faith and solid spirituality regarding the Christian life: “While you live,you must not give too much importance to successes, nor despair in times of trial and misfortune. The stable faith in God should be the light that illuminates our path in life, and the fear of God will lead us to the highest wisdom. Those who live according to this law will never make mistakes and in the most difficult moments of their lives they will be able to keep their peace of soul, the peace that the world is never able to offer” (Letter from 30 August 1957). Concerning married and family life, Bl. Oleksiy gave us the following inspiring instructions:
There is no better life than that in which you live in a good family, in which you take care of and help one another. There is no better friendship than between husband and wife. However, only those can feel happy in marriage who understand their family life in the light of the Gospel. Life is a duty! Living means glorifying the Creator through prayer. Living means doing good to others, being obedient, patient, knowing how to forgive, controlling every word that comes out of one’s mouth and one’s thoughts, so that they may contribute to the good of others. And the family itself is that place where one can conquer these virtues, and this for the dignity of one’s soul and for the achievement of happiness already in this world. Married life is the life of incessant yielding, of perpetual sacrifice and mutual help between spouses in the name of God and for the common good. May this be among you! Seek God, and your soul will be alive, this is what Jesus the Saviour teaches us. Whoever does not have God in his soul, even if he had all the riches of the world, would be of no use to himself. This is that strong thought that has enlightened me until now and I am happy to consider it the highest of my life. (Letter from 13 May 1957)
Last Letter to His Father
Bl. Oleksiy Zaritskiy addressed the last letter of his life to his father. In it, he expresses his sincere filial love for his father and an authentic supernatural vision of the Christian life centered on the Divine Wisdom of the Cross:
Dearest father! You are my greatest and most generous benefactor in the whole world. For 17 long years you enabled me to receive an education, you even limited yourself in sustenance so that I could do so, and now I am unable to thank you worthily. How I would like to be close to you to help you in your weakness! I sympathize with you in all this, and I carry with you this cross that Divine Providence has destined for you. I have begged for the gift of Divine Wisdom, which is the wisdom of the Cross: to endure everything patiently and consciously in order to attain eternal life. This means every day, indeed every minute, consecrating everything to the suffering Jesus, who carried His cross to Golgotha, so that we become aware of the sufferings amid which we too must stand firm and steadfast in the hope of attaining eternal life. For it is worthwhile to sacrifice oneself absolutely, without any reservations. It is once again necessary to recall these words that I read to you in 1961 about a nun who in her apparition after death said: “Were a person while living here on earth able to see God for just a brief instant, his soul would be filled with such joy, that he would be ready to endure all the tortures and sufferings, even the cruelest in the world, in order to be able to see God once again, even for another very brief instant, even while knowing well that this is no longer possible in this life.” May this thought be a comfort to you in your illness. May your strength be doubled to endure all this with the love of Jesus in the name of eternal life. (Letter from 3 October 1963)
ooo
This article is taken from a chapter in No Greater Love by Bishop Athanasius Schneider which is available from TAN Books.
