Saint Josaphat

Bishop and Martyr

Feast Day

November 12

Life

1580–1623

Canonized

1867

Order

Order of Saint Basil the Great (Basilians)

Born

Volodymyr, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (modern Ukraine)

Born Ioann Kuntsevych around 1580 in Volodymyr (Volhynia), Josaphat grew up in the wake of the Union of Brest of 1596, by which the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) bishops of the Kyivan Metropolia entered into communion with the See of Rome while retaining the Byzantine liturgical and canonical patrimony. Apprenticed as a youth to a merchant in Vilnius, he chose instead the monastic life, entering the Holy Trinity monastery there in 1604 and taking the name Josaphat. He was ordained priest in the Byzantine rite in 1609 and quickly became one of the leading preachers and reformers of the new Ruthenian Catholic Church.

In 1617 he founded, with Joseph Velamin Rutsky, the Order of Saint Basil the Great as a reformed monastic congregation for the Ruthenian Church. Consecrated Archbishop of Polotsk in 1618, he labored to consolidate the Union of Brest in his eparchy, restore church discipline, recover alienated monasteries, and catechize the faithful in the Catholic faith. His labors provoked violent opposition from the rival Orthodox hierarchy that had been re-established in 1620. On November 12, 1623, while making a pastoral visitation in Vitebsk, Josaphat was attacked by an anti-Union mob and martyred with an axe and a musket-ball; his body was thrown into the Daugava (Western Dvina) River. Pope Urban VIII beatified him in 1643, the first formal beatification of an Eastern Catholic. Pope Pius IX canonized him in 1867. He is a patron of efforts toward Christian unity.