Bonus pastor animam suam dat pro ovibus suis. “The good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep.” (John 10:11)
I. A martyr for unity
St. Josaphat is the first saint of the Eastern Churches whom Rome raised to the altars by the formal process of canonization, and he is still, four centuries after his death, one of the most contested. To the Ukrainian and Belarusian Catholics of the Byzantine rite he is a hieromartyr, the patron of their Church and the father of its unity with Rome. To many of the Orthodox of the same lands he is remembered as a persecutor, the man his enemies called dushokhvat, the “soul-snatcher.” Both memories go back to his own lifetime, and both have to be heard if his life is to be understood.
The record of that life is unusually full. Within five years of his death, Urban VIII opened an inquiry into his cause, and the commissions that followed heard on oath more than a hundred witnesses, many of whom had known him: monks who had lived with him at Vilnius, priests of his diocese, townsmen of Polotsk and Vitebsk, and some who had been his opponents. Their testimony, gathered while memory was still fresh, is the foundation of what follows. Around it the devotion of his people has gathered, as around every saint, a number of stories whose details cannot be checked. Where a story belongs to that tradition, it is given as such.
The Church has never asked us to pretend that her saints made no mistakes. She canonized Josaphat because he loved the unity of Christ’s flock with his whole life, laboured for it without sparing himself, and finally died for it, going out unarmed to those who had come to kill him. That is what the Collect of his feast asks us to imitate: not every judgment he made, but the Spirit by which, as the prayer says, “he laid down his life for his sheep.”
II. Volodymyr and Vilnius
Ivan Kuntsevych was born about the year 1580, some sources say 1584, at Volodymyr in Volhynia, an old town of the Ruthenian lands, then within the Kingdom of Poland and now in western Ukraine. The Ruthenians were the Eastern Slavs of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the ancestors of the Ukrainians and Belarusians of today. Their faith had come to them from Constantinople, through the baptism of Kiev in 988, and they worshipped in the Byzantine rite, in Church Slavonic. Ivan’s family belonged to that Church. His father, Gabriel, was a townsman of modest means, and his mother, Marina, a woman of piety who taught her son his prayers and took him to the services of the church.
The tradition of his cult, which passed into the lessons of the Roman Breviary, tells that when he was a small child his mother showed him an image of Christ on the Cross and spoke to him of the Passion, and that a spark seemed to fly from the side of the Crucified and strike his heart. The story is given here as the tradition of his cult. What is certain is that from his boyhood he loved the long services of the Byzantine Office, learned the liturgical books almost by heart, and was more often in church than anywhere else.
His parents could not afford to give him a long education, and as a youth he was sent to Vilnius, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and apprenticed to a merchant named Popovych. Vilnius was then one of the most religiously divided cities in Europe. Latin Catholics, Orthodox Ruthenians, Calvinists, Lutherans, Jews and Muslim Tatars lived within its walls, and the Jesuit academy founded there in 1579 had made it a centre of the Catholic revival. Ivan kept his master’s accounts faithfully, but he spent his free hours in church and in reading, and he was drawn into the circle of Ruthenians who supported the union with Rome. Popovych, who at first had looked on his apprentice’s piety with impatience, came to value him so highly that he offered him his daughter’s hand and his business. Ivan declined. He had already resolved to become a monk.
III. The Union of Brest
To understand the work to which Ivan gave his life, we must go back a century and a half.
At the Council of Florence in 1439, the bishops of the Greek East and the Latin West had signed a decree of reunion, Lætentur cæli, healing the schism that had divided Constantinople and Rome since the eleventh century. Among those who signed was Isidore, Metropolitan of Kiev. But the union of Florence did not take root. Isidore was driven from Moscow on his return, Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, and in the Ruthenian lands the union faded away within a generation.
By the end of the sixteenth century the Ruthenian Church was in a sorry state. Its bishops were often chosen by the king or by powerful nobles for reasons that had nothing to do with holiness. Its clergy were poor and ill-taught. Its monasteries were half empty. Laymen’s brotherhoods quarrelled with the bishops. And the Patriarchs of Constantinople, themselves subjects of the Sultan, could do little to help. At the same time, the Jesuits were drawing the sons of the Ruthenian nobility into the Latin Church, and Calvinism was spreading among them.
In 1595 and 1596, the Metropolitan of Kiev, Michael Rahoza, and the greater part of the Ruthenian bishops resolved to renew the union of Florence. Two of them, Hypatius Pociej and Cyril Terlecki, travelled to Rome, and in December 1595 they made their profession of faith before Pope Clement VIII. The Pope, in the constitution Magnus Dominus, received them into communion and confirmed them in the use of their own rite. In October 1596 the union was proclaimed at a synod at Brest. The Ruthenian Church kept its Byzantine liturgy, its married clergy, its calendar, and its own hierarchy; it accepted the authority of the Roman Pontiff and the teaching of Florence.
The union was not received by all. Two of the bishops, Gedeon Balaban of Lviv and Michael Kopystensky of Przemyśl, refused it, and the most powerful Ruthenian magnate, Prince Konstanty Ostrozhsky, threw his great wealth and influence against it. At Brest, at the very hour the union was proclaimed, a rival synod met in another place and condemned it. From that hour the Ruthenian people were divided: those who accepted the union, whom their opponents called Uniates, and those who rejected it, whom the Catholics called the disunited. Each side held that it was the true heir of the Church of Kiev. The division ran through towns, parishes, and families, and it would cost much blood.
IV. The Holy Trinity at Vilnius
In 1604, when he was about twenty-four, Ivan entered the monastery of the Holy Trinity at Vilnius, which had passed to the Catholics of the union, and received the monastic habit and the name of Josaphat. The monastery was poor and nearly empty. Its rule, the ancient rule of St. Basil, was barely observed. Josaphat set out to observe it as it was written. He fasted rigorously, prayed through the night, slept little and on the floor, wore a hair shirt, and disciplined himself. His contemporaries remembered that he learned the whole cycle of the Byzantine services and kept them in their fullness, and that he spent hours in prayer before the icons of the church.
Not long after, the monastery received another novice, Joseph Velamin Rutsky. He was a man of noble family and wide learning, who had been brought up a Calvinist, had become a Catholic at Prague, had studied at the Greek College in Rome, and had then chosen, against the wishes of his family, to pass from the Latin rite into the Ruthenian Church of the union, so as to serve his own people. The two men, so unlike in birth and education, became the closest of friends and collaborators. Rutsky brought learning and a gift for organisation; Josaphat brought the fire of a holy life and a deep knowledge of the Eastern tradition. Together they drew young men to the monastery, which had been on the point of closing, and began the reform of Ruthenian monasticism from which the Basilian Order, the Order of St. Basil the Great, would grow.
Josaphat studied theology privately under a Jesuit of the academy at Vilnius, Valentin Fabricius, and in 1609 he was ordained priest. He became known as a preacher and a confessor, and as a man who could not pass a poor man without giving him something. The witnesses of his beatification remembered that he gave alms to widows and orphans above all, and that when he was taken away to be made a bishop, the beggars of Vilnius wept. He was also known, already, for his zeal for the union. He sought out the Orthodox, argued with them, and brought many of them, laymen and monks, into communion with Rome. It was then that his opponents began to call him the soul-snatcher. His friends took up the name as a title of honour.
He served as hegumen, or superior, of several monasteries, and in 1614, when Rutsky became Metropolitan of Kiev, Josaphat succeeded him as archimandrite of the Holy Trinity.
V. Archbishop of Polotsk
On the twelfth of November, 1617, Josaphat was consecrated bishop, with the title of Vitebsk and the right of succession to the archdiocese of Polotsk, whose aged archbishop, Gedeon Brolnicki, needed help. He accepted with reluctance. In March 1618 Brolnicki died, and Josaphat became Archbishop of Polotsk. He was about thirty-eight.
His archdiocese was vast. It stretched across what is now northern and eastern Belarus, a land of forests, marshes and rivers, with the old cities of Polotsk, Vitebsk, Mogilev and Orsha. It was also in ruins. The churches were neglected, the clergy ignorant and often married to second wives against the canons, the property of the see scattered or seized by laymen. Josaphat set about restoring it as he had restored the monastery at Vilnius.
He began with the clergy. He held synods, issued rules for the conduct of priests, and drew up a catechism for them to teach their people; he required them to know it themselves. He visited his parishes, even the most remote, and preached constantly, in the language of the people. He recovered the lands of the see and spent their revenues on the poor and on churches. He rebuilt the Cathedral of St. Sophia at Polotsk. He lived as he had lived in his cell, and his house was full of the destitute. The tradition of his cult tells that once, when he had nothing left to give, he pawned his own omophorion, the stole of a Byzantine bishop, to feed a poor widow.
He was jealous for the Byzantine rite. The opponents of the union said, then and afterwards, that it was only a first step toward making the Ruthenians Latins, and some Latin clergy and nobles gave them reason to say it. Josaphat resisted every attempt to Latinize the liturgy of his Church. He kept the Byzantine services in their fullness and wished his people to keep them, and he believed, from his own study of the Fathers and the liturgical books, that the faith they expressed was the faith of Rome. For him, union with the Apostolic See was not the abandonment of the Church of Kiev. It was its restoration to what it had been in the days of St. Vladimir and of the undivided councils.
But it must also be said plainly that he was a man of his age, and that the Commonwealth of his day knew nothing of religious liberty as we now understand it. Josaphat held that the churches of his archdiocese belonged to the Church of the union, as the law of the realm held, and where the clergy or townsmen refused it, he took them back, with the help of the civil authorities. He forbade the disunited priests to minister and refused burial in consecrated ground to those who died outside communion. To his opponents this was persecution, and they said so loudly. To Josaphat it was the discharge of his office: he was the lawful bishop, and he would not abandon his flock to those he believed were leading it astray.
VI. The rival hierarchy
For some years the cause of the union seemed to be winning. The greater part of the Ruthenian population, especially in the north, was in communion with Rome. Then, in 1620, everything changed.
In that year Theophanes III, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, passing through the Commonwealth on his way home from Moscow, was persuaded to consecrate, secretly, at Kiev, under the protection of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, a complete new hierarchy for the disunited Ruthenians. Among those he consecrated was Meletius Smotrytsky, a learned and eloquent monk of Vilnius, the author of the most famous Church Slavonic grammar of the age, whom he made Archbishop of Polotsk. There were now two archbishops of Polotsk, and Smotrytsky set to work at once, by letters, pamphlets, and emissaries, to win back Josaphat’s flock. He told the people that Josaphat meant to make them Latins.
The effect was immediate. Vitebsk, Mogilev and Orsha rose against Josaphat. At Mogilev the gates were shut against him. He went from town to town, preaching, reasoning, and pleading, and in many places he won his people back. But the bitterness grew, and in some places it turned to plots against his life.
It was in this situation, in March 1622, that the Chancellor of Lithuania, Lew Sapieha, a Catholic and a supporter of the union, wrote to the archbishop a long and severe letter, which survives and has been much quoted on both sides ever since. Sapieha rebuked him for closing the churches of the disunited, for using force, and for driving the people to the edge of revolt, and warned him that his severity was harming the very union he wished to serve. Josaphat replied that he had done nothing but what the law and his office required, and that the troubles were the work of those who had set up an unlawful hierarchy against him. Historians still argue over how far each was right. The letter belongs to the record, and the Church did not hide it: it was examined in the process of his beatification.
What the letter did not change was Josaphat’s resolve. He knew that his life was in danger. He spoke of it often, and the witnesses remembered him saying that he wished nothing more than to shed his blood for the union and for obedience to the Apostolic See. In his sermons he told his people that if he were killed, he would count it a grace.
VII. Vitebsk
In October 1623, Josaphat went to Vitebsk, the most hostile of his cities, to make his visitation. His friends begged him not to go. He went.
For some days the town seethed. On the morning of Sunday, the twelfth of November, a priest of the disunited party, named Elias, stationed himself near the archbishop’s residence and began to shout insults against Josaphat and the union. Josaphat’s servants, after warning him more than once, seized the priest and shut him up in the house. That was the signal. The bells of the town churches were rung, and a crowd gathered and attacked the residence, beating the servants and breaking in.
Josaphat came out to meet them. The tradition of his cult preserves his words in this form: “My children, what are you doing? Why are you beating my servants? If you have anything against me, here I am.” They struck him on the head with a halberd and an axe, and when he had fallen they shot him and beat his body. The tradition says that, as he fell, he made the sign of the Cross and prayed for his murderers. Then the mob dragged his body through the streets, stripped it, mocked it, and threw it from a bluff into the river Dvina, weighted with stones.
He was about forty-three. He had been a bishop for six years to the day.
VIII. The blood of the martyr
The murder shocked the Commonwealth. King Sigismund III sent a commission to Vitebsk; the ringleaders were tried and condemned to death, and the city was punished with the loss of its privileges. The witnesses of the beatification remembered that many of the condemned were reconciled to the Church before their execution. Josaphat’s body was recovered from the Dvina some days later and carried to Polotsk, where it was laid in the Cathedral of St. Sophia that he had rebuilt.
The death of Josaphat did what his life had not. The tradition of the Basilian Order holds that it turned many of the disunited back to the union, and among them was the most notable of all. Meletius Smotrytsky, the rival archbishop, wavered for several years, and in 1627 he made his submission to Rome and entered the union. He spent the rest of his life defending it, and he died in a Basilian monastery in 1633.
Miracles were reported at the saint’s tomb. In 1628 Urban VIII appointed a commission to examine his cause, and in 1637 a second. The witnesses testified that his body, five years after his death, was still incorrupt. On the sixteenth of May, 1643, Urban VIII beatified him. He was the first Ruthenian beatified by Rome.
The canonization came more than two centuries later, in a very different world. By the nineteenth century, the Ruthenian lands had passed under the Russian Empire, which set out to destroy the union and absorb its faithful into the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1839 the Uniate Church within the Empire was abolished, and its people were forcibly united to the Russian Synod. On the twenty-ninth of June, 1867, the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul, in the eighteen-hundredth anniversary of their martyrdom, Pius IX canonized Josaphat in St. Peter’s. In 1882 Leo XIII extended his feast to the universal Church. In 1923, on the three-hundredth anniversary of his death, Pius XI issued the encyclical Ecclesiam Dei, in which he set St. Josaphat before the whole Church as the patron of the reunion of East and West, and asked the faithful to pray and work for it in charity toward the separated East.
IX. The wanderings of the relics
The body of Josaphat has had almost as troubled a history as his Church.
For three quarters of a century it lay at Polotsk. About 1705, during the Great Northern War, when the armies of Russia and Sweden were marching across the Commonwealth, it was carried for safety to Biała, the seat of the Radziwiłł princes, where it remained for more than two hundred years, first in the castle chapel and later in the Basilian church. In 1873, when the Russian authorities were preparing to suppress the last Uniate diocese in their empire, that of Chełm, the relics were hidden beneath the church floor, and they lay there, concealed, for more than forty years. During the First World War they were brought out and taken to Vienna, to the church of St. Barbara, the church of the Ukrainian Catholics in the capital. At the end of the Second World War, as the Soviet army approached Vienna, they were moved to Rome.
In 1946, at a pseudo-synod at Lviv staged by the Soviet authorities, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the largest of the heirs of the Union of Brest, was declared dissolved and annexed to the Russian Orthodox Church. Its bishops were imprisoned, and most of them died in prison. For more than forty years it lived in the catacombs, until it emerged again in 1989. Throughout those years, the body of its patron lay in Rome, near the tomb of St. Peter. In November 1963, at the wish of John XXIII and by the act of Paul VI, it was placed under the altar of St. Basil the Great in St. Peter’s Basilica, where it rests today, in the habit of a Basilian monk and the vestments of a Byzantine archbishop. Each year, on his feast, the Divine Liturgy is celebrated at that altar in the Byzantine rite.
In the 1962 calendar, the feast of St. Josaphat is kept on the fourteenth of November, III classis, since the twelfth, the day of his death, is the feast of St. Martin I, Pope and Martyr, himself a martyr for the faith of the Church at the hands of an Eastern emperor. The Mass is proper, Gaudeamus omnes, in red vestments. The Epistle is the description of the high priest “taken from among men” and ordained for men “in the things that appertain to God” (Heb. 5:1-6), and the Gospel is the Good Shepherd, who gives his life for his sheep and promises that there shall be “one fold and one shepherd” (John 10:11-16). The Collect asks God to stir up in His Church the Spirit with which Josaphat was filled when he laid down his life for his sheep.
X. What his life teaches
That the unity of the Church is worth a life. Our Lord prayed on the night before He died “that they all may be one” (John 17:21), and He laid down His life “that He might gather together in one the children of God that were dispersed” (John 11:52). Josaphat took that prayer as the work of his life. He did not regard the division of Christians as a regrettable fact to be managed, but as a wound in the Body of Christ, to be healed at any cost. The Church does not ask most of us to die for her unity. She does ask all of us to care about it as Christ does.
That unity is not uniformity. Josaphat was a Catholic in full communion with Rome, and he was wholly and jealously Eastern. He kept the Byzantine liturgy, the Byzantine Office, the Byzantine monastic rule, and he resisted those who wanted to make his people Latins. The Church that canonized him affirmed, in canonizing him, what the Council of Florence and Clement VIII had already taught: that the venerable rites of the East are a treasure of the whole Church, and that union with the See of Peter does not mean the loss of them. Leo XIII would say the same in Orientalium dignitas in 1894.
That zeal must be joined to charity. St. Paul wrote that if he had all faith, so that he could move mountains, and had not charity, he was nothing (1 Cor. 13:2). Josaphat’s zeal was real and holy, and it was sometimes, as his own Catholic friends told him, too hard. St. Francis de Sales, who was his contemporary, used to say that more flies are caught with a spoonful of honey than with a barrel of vinegar. The lesson is not that Josaphat was not a saint. It is that even saints are men, and that we who are not saints must be all the more careful that our zeal for the truth does not outrun our love for those who do not yet see it.
That a shepherd does not flee. “The hireling flieth, because he is a hireling” (John 10:13). Josaphat could have stayed away from Vitebsk. His friends begged him to. He went, because his flock was there, and when the mob came, he did not hide; he went out to meet them. Every Christian who has any charge over others, as parent, teacher, priest, or employer, is tempted at some point to flee, by silence or by absence. Josaphat shows what it looks like not to.
That the blood of martyrs is seed. Tertullian’s word was proved again at Vitebsk. The man who had laboured for years to win his rival’s flock won his rival himself by dying. The Church that the Russian and Soviet empires tried for three centuries to destroy is alive today, and its patron lies in St. Peter’s. God brings good out of the worst that men can do, and He does it most of all through those who suffer for Him.
That we must pray for our enemies. The tradition remembers that Josaphat died praying for the men who killed him, as Our Lord did on the Cross and St. Stephen under the stones. The quarrels that divide Christians are often bitter, and the bitterness is not all on one side. The first duty of a Catholic toward the separated brethren, East and West, is to pray for them, and to pray as one who knows he too has sins to be forgiven.
Practice
Examine. Do I care about the unity of Christians, or do I treat the divisions of the Church as none of my concern? When I defend the truth, do I defend it with charity, or do I enjoy being right? Is there anyone, in my family, parish, or work, from whom I am estranged, and whom I have made no effort to reconcile? Have I fled from some responsibility by silence or absence when the wolf came? Do I pray for those who oppose me, or only complain of them?
Do. Pray today for the unity of all Christians in the one Church of Christ, and especially for the Eastern Catholic Churches, above all the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which has suffered so much for its communion with Rome and suffers still in the war of our own day. Pray also for the Orthodox, with the charity Pius XI asked of us. If you can, attend or learn something of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the liturgy St. Josaphat celebrated, so as to know and love the treasure of the Christian East. Take one concrete step today toward healing a quarrel in your own life.
Pray. The Collect of the feast:
Excita, quæsumus, Domine, in Ecclesia tua Spiritum, quo repletus beatus Iosaphat Martyr et Pontifex tuus animam suam pro ovibus posuit: ut, eo intercedente, nos quoque eodem Spiritu moti ac roborati, animam nostram pro fratribus ponere non vereamur. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate eiusdem Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“Stir up in Thy Church, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the Spirit with which blessed Josaphat, Thy Martyr and Bishop, was filled when he laid down his life for his sheep: that, through his intercession, we too, moved and strengthened by the same Spirit, may not fear to lay down our life for our brethren. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the same Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Ut omnes unum sint. “That they all may be one.” (John 17:21)
Devote. Saturday belongs to Our Lady, and today she yields her altar to a martyr who loved her. Pray the Sub tuum præsidium, the oldest known prayer to the Mother of God, which East and West have always shared, or her Rosary, and ask her, whom the East calls the Theotokos, to gather her scattered children into one flock under her Son. Ask St. Josaphat to obtain for you a love of the Church’s unity that is fearless and gentle at once, and commend to him the Christians of Ukraine and Belarus.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path sets St. Josaphat beside Metropolitan Joseph Velamin Rutsky and the Basilian reform, beside St. Andrew Bobola, the Jesuit martyred in the same lands in 1657, and beside the twentieth-century martyrs of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The Church History path follows the Council of Florence, the Union of Brest, the rival hierarchy of 1620, and the long suppression of the union under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, from 1839 to 1946 and 1989. The East-West thread considers the hard question of why the Orthodox and the Catholics remember Josaphat so differently, what Pius XI’s Ecclesiam Dei and Leo XIII’s Orientalium dignitas asked of Catholics toward the Christian East, and why the Church has always held that union with Rome does not require the surrender of an Eastern rite. The Sacred Liturgy path turns to the Byzantine Divine Liturgy and Office that Josaphat kept with such devotion.
Sancte Iosaphat, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; the Roman Breviary and Missal for 14 November; the Roman Martyrology for 12 November; the decree of union Lætentur cæli of the Council of Florence (1439); Clement VIII, Magnus Dominus (1595); Pius XI, Ecclesiam Dei (1923); Leo XIII, Orientalium dignitas (1894); the acts of the beatification (1643) and canonization (1867) of St. Josaphat; Butler’s Lives of the Saints*; the Catholic Encyclopedia; the Encyclopedia of Ukraine; D. Wereda, studies on the cult of the relics at Biała. The spark from the Crucified, the pawning of the omophorion, the words spoken to the mob at Vitebsk, and the prayer for his murderers are given as the tradition of the cult.*