A saint for Western Canada. (News in Brief: Canada).

Winnipeg--On June 30, 1973, Eparch (Bishop) Vasyl Velychkovsky, a refugee from persecution in his native Ukraine, died in Winnipeg. Doctors who examined him found internal and external marks of torture on his body. They concluded that he had been given a drug which caused his major organs to fail. He was named a martyr of the Catholic Church and beatified in Lviv, Ukraine, on June 27, 2001.

In March of 1945, the bishop, then a priest, was rounded up along with many Ukrainian Catholic Eastern-rite clergy after the Soviets retook Ukraine from the Arctic circle. Somehow he survived, and in 1955 he returned to Kiev.

The head of the Church in Ukraine, Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj, was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1963. He received Father Velychkovsky and, before he left, under the noses of the KGB, he ordained him as his successor. After ten years, Bishop Velychkovsky was rearrested and put in a psychiatric hospital where they administered the fatal poison. International pressure secured his release in 1972, allowing him to travel to Winnipeg, where he had family members and fellow Redemptorist priests. He died in 1973.

St. Joseph's Ukrainian Catholic Church, where a shrine has been constructed to hold his relics, has now become a place of pilgrimage for Ukrainian Catholics anxious to pray at the tomb of a man who may one day be declared a saint. Eparch Velychkovsky is the second person in Western Canada to reach the ranks of the "beati." He shares the honour with Bishop Nicetas Budka, eparch of Canada's Ukrainians from 1912 to 1927, who was martyred in a Soviet labour camp in 1946 or 1947. His remains have never been recovered.