Seventy-one years ago, on September 25, 1949, Dr. Friedrich Funder of the Catholic newspaper the Register reported from Vienna about the situation in Soviet Ukraine and the functioning of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, as it struggled to maintain its faith in practice under Soviet rule.
A dwindling number of priests, without a single bishop, were keeping the faith alive in Ukraine – a Church that once boasted many bishops, thousands of priests and millions of faithful. The Ukrainian Catholic Church was forcibly liquidated in 1946 through a sham Synod, orchestrated by the Soviets, which absorbed the Ukrainian Catholic Church into the Russian Orthodox Church.