“Nothing unworthy of God’s majesty”: In praise of Fr. Roman Galadza (1943-2023)
by
My maternal grandfather of blessed memory taught me something more than forty years ago: we who are so quick to criticize our leaders, he said, should be equally if not more quick to praise them when it was due. I confess that I am as guilty if not more so of despairing, and I would be inclined to uncharitable and totalized dismissals of the entire clerical caste if all I had were headlines to go by. Fortunately, Divine Providence has, for many decades of my life now, sent priests to me first and foremost as friends; and more recently priests as patients in my private practice in psychotherapy. I gratefully and with real affection count several Catholic and Orthodox deacons and priests as dear friends, and I cherish my patients also.
In both cases, I have been able to see things from a very different perspective. In both cases—among my friends and my patients—I am given closer, deeper glimpses into the hearts and minds of those onto whom too many of us too often project all sorts of paternal transferences and half-deformed longings. Too many parishioners are inclined to overlook the fact that priests are first and foremost human beings. A Roman collar does nothing to alter deficiencies of intellect; the laying on of hands at ordination does not alter disorders of personality.
And priests so often perform glorious and breathtaking work of joy that touches thousands around the world and leaves behind a profound and transformational legacy of unprecedented beauty. One such priest has just died: the Mitred Archpriest Roman Galadza, founding pastor of St. Elias the Prophet Church in Brampton, Ontario. He died on August 1st, at the age of eighty.
Fr Roman trained in Connecticut and Washington, DC, but then moved to Canada in the 1970s. The founding Ukrainian Catholic bishop of Toronto, Isidore Borecky, was the only hierarch in the new world with courage to ordain Fr. Roman, who, following apostolic example and age-old custom of the Eastern Churches was the first married Ukrainian Catholic priest ordained in and for North America. (I have written about this in my recent book Married Priests in the Catholic Church, which includes a crucial chapter written by his wife Irene.) In 1929, in a gesture that drove tens of thousands out of the Catholic Church, the Vatican tried to ban the presence of married priests among the Eastern Catholic parishes of North America which had been growing since the late 19th century. Bishop Isidore rightly believed this ban was unjust and he ignored it. Eventually, lesser men in mitres would follow suit, so that by the turn of this century, the Ukrainian Catholic bishops across Canada were openly ordaining married men, and those here in the US have been doing so as well.
Fr. Roman’s ordination generated no small controversy among various Latin-rite Catholics in Canada and Rome. But he ignored them and instead poured his energies into building, from the ground up, the most unique parish anywhere in the world outside Ukraine. The St Elias the Prophet Church is a stunning, all-wood Church in Boyko style, the first outside of Ukraine. In 2014, after nearly two decades in which daily prayer ascended with incense to the praise of the holy, consubstantial, and undivided Trinity, the church caught fire and was completely destroyed. I wept most of that day as we got updates, but knew that it would be rebuilt, as it was with breakneck speed before being consecrated anew in October 2016.
I first met Fr Roman in the pivotal year of 2001, when my life had been severely uprooted and not gone at all to plan. Over coffee hour after liturgy, he—with what I now see was calculated casualness—invited me to go with him that summer to Ukraine to teach English. He was almost impossible to say no to, using what I’m tempted to call the Johnson method, after the late American president who was reputed to use a combination of charm, imposing physical demeanor, humor, and stern cajoling to get people to do all sorts of things they didn’t know they wanted to do or felt themselves capable of doing. I thought his invitation was a bit flippant and slyly agreed while engaging in what Jesuit confessors of the old school would denounce as “mental reservation” in which I said quietly to myself “I’ll say ‘yes’ because he’ll never remember this conversation and I can get out of going later.”
But he did not at all forget and I did not get out of going, and I thank God for that mercy. Airplane tickets showed up in my mail in late May of that year, and we were gone until mid-August. It profoundly changed my life for the good. We taught English to lay students and seminarians of the Lviv Theological Academy (as it was then called—the predecessor of today’s Ukrainian Catholic University), and later toured the country, where Fr Roman had been born, visiting some of his cousins and others still there. I fell in love with the country and have always longed to go back.
Thousands of stories like mine could be told, are being told now following his death, and will be told in the weeks ahead. I could tell other stories, but would rather note something that was very dear to his heart: the music and liturgy of the UGCC, which Roman Galadza has arguably done more than anyone in the past century to grow and flourish, not just in Ukrainian but especially in English. His parish is a model par excellence of a parish where there is full, conscious, active participation (in two, and sometimes more, languages!) by a wonderfully diverse crowd of people of all ages and races in Saturday Vespers, Sunday Matins, and Sunday Divine Liturgy (in total a good six hours of worship every weekend, longer on major feasts, in a parish without pews). People travel to St. Elias from around the world to learn how to master Galician and Kyivan chant. No one who enters the church, lit only by candles, for Saturday Vespers can emerge feeling anything other than deeply moved and mystically transported beyond the surly bonds of earth.
The parish is not just a liturgical powerhouse and a teacher and beacon to others. It is also a wonderful community of real human beings who share rich fellowship in practical ways, not least by welcoming recent Ukrainian refugees after Russia’s hideous and wicked attack on their country. Fr. Roman has always seemed as happy preaching and presiding as he is in his shirtsleeves sitting on the stunningly beautiful grounds by the pond playing his guitar and teaching the kids folk songs.
For such labours as these, and myriad more we could mention, he was many years ago named a mitred archpriest. That is the highest honor the Eastern Churches of the Byzantine tradition can give to priests who are married. It says, in essence, that we think so highly of this priest we would in fact make him a bishop but for the requirement that bishops should be celibate.
Unlike celibate priests who are sometimes achingly lonely, Fr. Roman was surrounded by a wonderful family, starting with his stunningly accomplished and gracious wife Irene and their six equally accomplished children (one of whom is currently ambassador of His Majesty’s Canadian Dominion to Ukraine). It was not an easy vocation for either, as both confided to me on different occasions, and Irene has written about in my book. Clerical marriages demand a great deal of sacrifice from spouses and children especially.
Those countless sacrifices across Roman Galadza’s eighty years all seem to have been motivated by a lovely verse attributed to Origen of Alexandra: “nothing unworthy of God’s majesty.” In things small and large, Fr Roman sought to glorify the Majesty of the Most High by building a temple where, as he once put it, the “things of earth and the things of heaven can sing and dance together.” Indeed they did, giving inexpressible joy to so many of us who sorrow now at his death.
May he now continue to sing and dance around the banquet table of the Lamb whom he sacrificed so many times on the altar at St. Elias, and may that Lamb, we pray, now say to him “Well done, good and faithful servant! Enter into the joy of your Lord.”
