Volodymyr Sterniuk

Volodymyr Sternjuk C.Ss.R. ( born February 12, 1907 in Pustomyty, Galicia, † September 29, 1997 in Lviv ) was a suffragan bishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and Titular Archbishop of Marcianopolis.

Life

Volodymyr Sternjuk completed his theological studies initially in Lviv, then in Belgium. He decided to enter the Order of Redemptorists after completing his theological studies and was ordained in this Congregation on September 21, 1931 at the age of just twenty-five years as a priest.

Sternjuk experienced the persecution of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church by the Soviets after the Second World War. As a participant in the " pseudo- synod of Lviv " he survived initially hidden assassination in March 1946. Thereupon he was in 1947 sentenced to five years in prison by the communist government of the Soviet Union and spent in a Soviet labor camp in Siberia. He returned to Lviv and began secretly his pastoral activities of a Greek Catholic priest continued. Professional Sternjuk had worked as an accountant, paramedics, caretaker, as well as guards.

The episcopal ordination Sternjuks on July 19, 1964, aged fifty-seven years by the blessed Bishop Vasyl Vsevolod Velychkovsky. Between 1972 and 1991 witnessed the Ukrainian Catholic Church, especially under the leader of the CPSU Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, renewed systematic persecution. In the time Sternjuk had been commissioned as a church representative with the pastoral leadership of the Ukrainian Catholic Church and represented by Myroslaw Ljubatschiwskyj.

On January 16, 1991 Volodymyr Sternjuk was appointed at the age of nearly eighty-four years ago by Pope John Paul II appointed auxiliary bishop in Lviv and Titular Archbishop of Marcianopolis. In 1996 Sternjuk was released due to age by his diocesan leadership roles.

On 29 September 1997, died Bishop Volodymyr Sternjuk at the age of ninety years in Lviv.