John Bukovsky

John Bukovsky SVD (* when Jan Bukowski January 18, 1924 in Cerová, Slovakia, † 18 December, 2010 Techny, Illinois, United States) was a Roman Catholic religious priest and Vatican diplomat.

Life

John Bukovsky came in Nitra in the Congregation of the Divine Word Missionaries. Due to the political persecution in his home country he moved to his study of philosophy in 1947 from the United States and finished his theological studies. On 3 December 1950, he received in Techny, the center of America's Divine Word Missionaries in Chicago, the ordination. He was first in the priesthood and also acquired in 1952 licentiate in theology from the Catholic University of America in Washington. From 1952 to 1954 he was Professor of Sacred Scripture in the religious seminary in Techny; he was considered an expert on the Greek and Hebrew translations. From 1954 to 1956 he studied at the Pontifical Biblical Institute exegesis. Until 1967 he worked in research and teaching in Techny. In 1967 he became rector of the university of his order in Techny and appointed shortly afterwards in the General Chapter of the Order in Rome. He was active in its relations with Czechoslovakia and from 1973 in the Vatican Secretariat of State for Relations with Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania in 1968 consultants of the Holy See. He worked in particular together with the charges later Cardinals Agostino Casaroli and Luigi Poggi and accompanied both often in the Romania of the 1970s, and others at that time communist governments in Eastern Europe countries.

On August 18, 1990, Pope John Paul II appointed Titular Archbishop of Tabalta and Apostolic Nuncio to Romania. On October 13, 1990, he received from Cardinal Secretary of State Agostino Casaroli in St. Peter's episcopal ordination; Co-consecrators were Casaroli successor, Angelo Sodano, and Francesco Colasuonno, Apostolic Delegate in Russia. In Romania, he took care of after the fall of communism in particular to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Romania as well as the safeguarding of assets of the Greek Catholic Church.

In 1994, Bukovsky as Apostolic Nuncio to the Russian Federation in Moscow. Here he continued the started by Colasuonno steps to establish a Catholic Church hierarchy in Russia and consecrated the bishops Jerzy Mazur and Clemens Pickel. He succeeded to reopen the seminary in St. Petersburg.

His old conditional resignation to the Pope took place with effect from 29 January 2000. His retirement Bukovsky spent first in Vienna and later in the center of his order in Techny, where he died. He was buried on 3 January 2011 in Slovakia, in the crypt of the Church of Our Lady of Calvary in Nitra.

In 2006 he published his autobiography " Spomienky spoločníka " in Slovak.

Publications

• Spomienky spoločníka, Nitra 2006, ISBN 978-80-8522376-7
• Chiesa del martirio, chiesa della diplomazia: Memorie tra Cecoslovacchia e Vaticano, EDB, Bologna 2009, ISBN 978-8810140499