Blessed Nykyta Budka

Nykyta Budka (Ukrainian: Никита Будка aka Nikita, Mykyta, or Nicetas Budka; June 7, 1877 in Dobromirka, Austria-Hungary – October 1, 1949 in Karaganda, USSR) was a Austro-Hungarian-born priest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church who lived and worked in Austria-Hungary, Canada, Poland, and the Soviet Union. In Canada, he is noted as the first bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Canada, and was the first Eastern Catholic bishop with full jurisdiction ever appointed in the New World. Budka returned to Europe in 1927 and eventually came under the authority of the Soviet Union. He resisted their encroachments against the Ukrainian Church, however, and was worked to death at a gulag in 1949. His cause for canonization was opened after his death and he was beatified as a martyr in 2001 by Pope John Paul II. He was born into a fairly well to-do and political active peasant family in the village of Dobromirka in Zbarazh powiat (county), then part of Galicia, in Austria-Hungary in 1877. He received his primary education in his native village and the county town, and later studied at the classical gymnasium in Ternopil, where he graduated in 1897 with honors. He then worked as a tutor for the children of Prince Leo Sapieha in Bilche Zolote, and then did a year of military service, taking officer's training in Vienna. He studied law at the University of Lviv and theology at Lviv Theological Seminary. In 1902 he entered the Collegium Canisianum in Innsbruck, Austria. Budka was ordained as a priest by Metropolitan Andriy (Sheptytsky) in L'viv, the capital of Austrian Galicia, on October 25, 1905 at the age of twenty-eight. In 1907 Budka was named the prefect of the seminary in Lviv. In 1909 he wrote a doctoral dissertation on Byzantine religious history 1909 entitled Діссертация докторска: Дисциплїна Грецкої Церкви в сьвітлі полєміки за часів Фотия, but was not able to defend it due to ill health and later his departure for Canada.