Nykyta Budka

Who was Nykyta Budka?

Blessed Nykyta Budka was a clergyman of the of Ukrainian 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. His first name is sometimes written as Nikita or Mykyta.

He was born in a village in Zbarazh, then part of Galicia, in Austria-Hungary in 1877. Budka was ordained as a priest in L'viv, the capital of Austrian Galicia, in 1905.

He was appointed the Bishop for Canada on July 15, 1912, and consecrated on October 14 that year. In Canada, he became known as a strident defender of the autonomy of the Ukrainian church from the Latin hierarchy, and a fierce opponent of missionary actives amongst Ukrainian Canadian by Russian Orthodox and Protestant churches, and of secularism. He was broadly supportive of Ukrainian nationalism. However, he is most famous for his pastoral letter just before the outbreak of World War I, in which he urged Ukrainians in Canada with reservist obligations to return to their homeland to enlist and fight. Their homeland was Austria, which soon was at war with Canada. Although he later retracted his letter, the damage was already done. This helped inflame an existing suspicion and scrutiny of the Ukrainian Canadian community by the wider public and the government that led to the internment of Ukrainians in Canada during the war.