Saint · Modern
Bl. Josaphata Hordashevska
1869–1919 · Ukrainian Greek Catholic active religious life
Michaelina Hordashevska; co-foundress with Fr. Jeremiah Lomnytskyj of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate; beatified by St. John Paul II in Lviv, 2001.
A young woman of Lviv who wanted the contemplative life of the Basilian nuns, then the only Eastern-rite women's community in Galicia, and was asked instead to lead the first active Ukrainian Greek Catholic congregation. After a short training with the Polish Felician Sisters she declined to stay with them, saying her work was among her own people, and in 1892 began the Sisters Servants in the village of Zhuzhel: teaching peasants to read in Ukrainian, catechizing, running day nurseries, nursing the sick through cholera and typhus, and teaching chant and the sewing of vestments to restore village churches. Divisions in the young community led her to resign as superior; she was restored in 1909 and died of bone tuberculosis.
Why he matters: She brought the active apostolic religious life to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church without giving up its rite, and her congregation's motto, to serve “where the need is greatest,” still governs its work across the diaspora.
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