Redemptorist Fathers

Redemptorist Fathers (formally, the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer). An order of Catholic priests and monks founded in 1732 by A. de Liguori in Scala (near Naples), Italy. Established as an order of evangelists and practising clergymen, it spread throughout Europe in the late 18th century and by the 1970s had over 7,400 members. In 1913 Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and P. Murray, the head of the order, reached an agreement (approved by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith) by which Belgian Redemptorists who had been working in Saskatchewan in Canada were brought to Galicia and converted to the Eastern rite. They formed a Ukrainian branch of the order, centered near Lviv. Mission houses were opened in Stanyslaviv, Kovel (in Volhynia), Lviv (the residence of its protohegumen), and Ternopil. By the Second World War there were almost 100 members of the order in Galicia and another 24 in Transcarpathia (in Mykhailivtsi and Khust). The first Ukrainian Redemptorist house in Canada was established in Yorkton (Saskatchewan), under the direction of Rev Achille Delaere in 1913. Other centers opened in Wynyard and Ituna (Saskatchewan); Roblin (Manitoba), where the order runs a boarding school; Toronto; and Winnipeg (the residence of the protohegumen). The major center remained Yorkton, where a religious publishing house and the journals Holos Spasytelia and Lohos were established. In the United States there are 60 monks (1987) in missions in Newark and in Washington, DC. Several Ukrainian Catholic bishops have belonged to the order, including metropolitans Maksym Hermaniuk, Volodymyr Sterniuk, and Michael Bzdel and bishops Volodymyr Malanchuk, Vasyl Velychkovsky, Michael Hrynchyshyn, and F. Kurchaba.

Wasyl Lencyk, Volodymyr Malanchuk

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]