Editor’s Preface
I lived in the Canadian prairie provinces as a university student and seminarian from 1973 to 1976, and as a priest from 1989 to 2001. Wide swaths of countryside in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta have so many Orthodox and Eastern Catholic church structures, in various states of repair and disrepair, that you find it easy to imagine yourself mystically transported to 19th- and early 20th-century Eastern Europe.
These churches are not only Ukrainian: a smaller presence of Romanian Orthodox churches stretches from the Roblin-Russell area in northwestern Manitoba to the Kayville-Assiniboia area in southern Saskatchewan, close to the Canada-US border. I spent most of my priesthood surrounded by Ukrainian churches such as those pictured below while I ministered to the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Romanian immigrants who arrived in Canada to homestead between the 1890s and the 1910s. The Ukrainian Orthodox church in Wroxton sits a short 15- or 20-minute drive from my last parish. My family and I passed it all the time to and from Yorkton, the closest major shopping destination an hour from our home.
Unremarked in the text below, Orthodox Slavs who immigrated from Austro-Hungary or Poland to Canada during the period in question were served by the existing North American diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church. The parishes they founded over 100 years ago now belong, for the most part, to the Archdiocese of Canada of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). The much larger Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada—canonical for only some 30 years now—has its roots in the return from Uniatism to Orthodoxy for the same reasons that motivated St. Alexis Toth and his followers, i.e., the Vatican’s prohibition of married clergy outside of the Unia’s original territories.
For additional context see the Canadian Orthodox History Project.
Giacomo Sanfilippo, Editor
Approximately 170,000 Ukrainians from the Austro-Hungarian crownlands of Galicia and Bukovina (Bukovyna) arrived in Canada from September 1891 to August 1914. The vast majority settled in the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, where they obtained land to farm.
Few of the early immigrants would have called themselves Ukrainian, but rather identified themselves as Galicians, Ruthenians, Hutsuls, Lemkos, or Bukovynians. Most Ukrainians from Galicia, including Ruthenians, Hutsuls, and Lemkos, were Greek Catholic, while those from Bukovyna were Greek Orthodox.
ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE 