What prompts people to undertake the extraordinary?
Mykolai-Vasyl Diakiv was born in Bachiv, Peremyshliany district, Lviv region, on May 1, 1914. His father, a cultural and educational activist, participated in the Ukrainian war of independence of 1918-1919. Bachiv was “a patriotic village,” with Sich, Sokil, and Prosvita organizations. When, in the wake of the Polish pacification of 1930, Bishop Ivan Buchko visited the village, young Mykolai greeted him with a poem of welcome.
With the outbreak of war in 1939, Mykolai was drafted into the Polish army. Taken prisoner by the Germans near Warsaw, he was held in a concentration camp near Koenigsberg in East Prussia. He was released under a German-Ukrainian agreement and sent to Krakow. Returning to western Ukraine in June 1941, Diakiv became a military instructor for volunteer independence fighters, adopting the nom de guerre “Chornohora.” The Germans arrested him and held him at the Łącki Street prison in Lviv. There he contracted typhus and, presumed dead, was taken to the morgue. Diakiv was among those released in 1942 through the efforts of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. Returning to his village, he learned that his father had been executed by the Soviets at Zolochiv.
In August 1944 Mykolai was seized by the Soviets and beaten “until I was as black as this cassock.” As he later recounted, “they told me, ‘Choose: either dig yourself a grave, or join the Red Army.’” On the frontlines, bullets tore through his cap and clothing. He saw his commander take an explosive bullet in the face. But Diakiv was never hit. “Then I understood that God was protecting me.” “If I ever get out of this hell,” he vowed, “I will study for the priesthood, and for you, Mother of God, I will build a church.”
Again taken prisoner by the Germans, Diakiv was held in a concentration camp in Bohemia, but with his brother’s help managed to escape to Bavaria just as the war was ending. There, Bishop Buchko, now apostolic visitator for Ukrainians in Western Europe, was recruiting candidates for the priesthood. He remembered the boy who had greeted him a dozen years before. Diakiv began studies at the Hirschberg seminary near Munich in 1946. In a 1994 interview, he attributed his priestly vocation to three instances when he had found himself “on the edge of life and death.”
In April 1948, the seminary was moved to Culemborg in the Netherlands. Diakiv completed his studies and was ordained by Bishop Buchko in December 1950. At this point he took the name of Vasyl Pryima, a fellow villager who had died in 1940 (“Pryima,” incidentally, means “adopted child.”)
In 1951, the newly ordained Father Pryima was assigned to Toulouse and Lourdes in southern France. With neither a dwelling place nor a church, he set out to gather the scattered Ukrainian emigrants into parishes. Honoring the vow he had taken in 1944, he undertook to build a church dedicated to the Mother of God. In sermons, appeals and poems written under the nom de plume Mykola Diakiv-Halychko, Father Pryima called upon Ukrainians around the world to fund “little bricks” for the church. Designed by architect Myroslav Nimciv with a polychrome interior by Jerzy Nowosielski, the church of the Dormition of the Mother of God at Lourdes was dedicated in 1982. Nearby, Father Pryima built a hotel and a home for priests and nuns. He even arranged for the street between the church and the hotel to be officially named Rue de l’Ukraine.
The story of Lourdes is well known. From February to July 1858, the 14-year-old peasant girl Bernada Sobirós (her Occitan name; later she was known by the French name Bernadette Soubirous), had 18 visions of “a small young lady” at the grotto of Massabielle, who instructed her to dig out a spring, drink the water and eat the herbs, and build a chapel. The lady eventually identified herself as “Immaculate Conception” – a doctrine about the Virgin Mary that Pope Pius IX had defined four years earlier but of which the girl knew nothing.
Although not promised in the visions, over the past 160 years innumerable cures have been reported among pilgrims who drank from the spring or simply visited the town. Chemical analysis of the water has revealed no curative properties, and no scientific explanation has been found. The Catholic Church regards 70 of the cures as miraculous.
In 1940, the Austrian Jewish novelist Franz Werfel, who had fled to France in 1938 and was trying to reach neutral Portugal, sought refuge in Lourdes. Taken in by various families and Catholic orders, he listened to stories about Bernadette Soubirous. He vowed to write about her should he survive. Eventually making his way to Los Angeles, in 1941 he published “Song of Bernadette,” a novel structured after the rosary.
Thus, at Lourdes the visions of a French peasant girl turned a sleepy town into a world pilgrimage center, an Austrian Jew fleeing for his life undertook to write a best-seller, and a Ukrainian who had barely escaped death similarly fulfilled a vow to build a church for his nation.
Father Pryima died in 2004 and was buried in his native village of Bachiv. The Father Vasyl Pryima Foundation plans to install a memorial plaque in the Dormition Church in Lourdes. It would be a fitting tribute to one who devoted his life “to God and Ukraine.”
SOURCES:
Dmytro Blazejowskyj, “Byzantine Kyivan Rite Students in Pontifical Colleges, and in Seminaries, Universities and Institutes of Central and Western Europe (1576-1983),” Analecta OSBM, Ser. II, Sec. I (Rome, 1984), pp. 36-37, 94; id., “Ukrainian Catholic Clergy in Diaspora (1751-1988)” (Rome, 1988), pp. 190, 274.)
Bernard François, Esther M. Sternberg and Elizabeth Fee, “The Lourdes Medical Cures Revisited,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (January 2014), pp. 135-62.
Ostap Horlatyi, Oleksandra and Stepan Hrabovsky, untitled article in Hryhorii Vereta, “Boh ie liubov” (2nd ed.)(Lviv: Spolom, 2017), pp. 5-13.