Bishop Sipovich new file

33 5. Beginning of the Apostolate The war brought a considerable number of Belarusians to Italy. Many of these, as former Polish citizens, were serving in the ranks of the Polish army. Others began arriving as refugees soon after the cessation of hostilities in May 1945. Among the new arrivals in Rome in 1945 were two Belarusian Catholic priests. One of them, Father Peter Tatarynovich (1896-1978) was a priest of the Roman rite. Ordained in 1921, he had worked in various parishes of the Pinsk diocese. A friend of Father Adam Stankievich, he had been a regular contributor to Chryscijanskaja dumka and author of several books. As has been already noted, during the war Tatarynovich was pastor to the Belarusian community in Warsaw. In 1944, with the approach of the Soviet troops, he and most of his flock abandoned that city and headed West. The end of the war found him in Germany. In the autumn of 1945 Tatarynovich arrived in Rome, where, despite his age (he was 49) he enrolled in the Pontifical Oriental Institute. In 1949 he received a Doctor’s degree for a thesis on the spiritual teaching of the 12th century Belarusian saint, Cyril, bishop of Turau. He was to remain in the Eternal City for the rest of his life. The second arrival was a priest of the Byzantine rite, Father Leo Haroshka (1911-1977). Unlike other Belarusian priests, he had had the good fortune of receiving his secondary education at the Belarusian High School ("himnaziia") in Navahradak, before it was closed by the Polish authorities. After finishing school he decided to dedicate his life to the restoration of the Belarusian Greek Catholic ("Uniate") Church which had been suppressed by the Russians in 1839. In 1931 he began his training for priesthood at the Ukrainian Seminary in L’viv, where he was accepted by Metroplitan Andrew Sheptycky. After his priestly ordination in 1937 he had been working in the Pinsk Diocese. His first appointment was at Stoupcy, a frontier town between the Polish Republic and the Soviet Union. In May 1939 he was expelled from there by the Polish authorities, who considered him a danger to the security of the Polish State. With the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the fall of Poland, Metropolitan Sheptycky established a Greek Catholic Exarchate for Belarus, which in 1941 was reluctantly approved by Rome. The Exarch was Father Anthony Niemantsevich, who appointed Father Haroshka second councillor of the Exarchate. After the arrest of Niemantsevich by the Germans in July 1942 and his subsequent death in prison, the responsibility for the exarchate fell on Father Haroshka. He was also very active in the field of education. As head of the Belarusian Medical School in Baranavichy he was arrested in 1943 when he thwarted the plans of the Germans to round up the students and send them to Germany as forced labourers. The end of the war found him a refugee in Germany. From there he wrote to Rome to the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, reporting on the state of the Greek Catholic Church in Belarus, and demanded what was to be done to help Belarusian Greek Catholics at home and in exile. Having received no reply, Haroshka on his own initiative and without asking anyone’s permission, made his way to Rome and presented himself in person to the Congregation for the Eastern Churches. This time he was noticed. He was given accommodation at the Russicum at the expense of the Congregation. By the end of the year Haroshka, with the blessing of the Congregation, had started work on the prayer book for the faithful Bozhym shliakham (On God’s way) which appeared early in 1946. It so happened that the same year 1946 marked 350th anniversary of the Union of Brest of 1596, when the Orthodox Church in Belarus and Ukraine was united with the Holy See. To mark this occasion Pope Pius XII issued on 25 Decemeber 1945 an Encyclical Letter "Orientales omnes". Father Haroshka persuaded the Congregation of the necessity of translating it