Ukrainian Greek Catholic Nun Celebrates 101st Birthday
A nun of the Congregation of Sisters of St. Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Klavdiya Koretska, celebrated her 101st birthday on March 12. During her long and busy life she witnessed many historical events. She began her spiritual ministry when the church was led by Metropolitan Sheptytsky, lived through the war, the liquidation of the UGCC, its underground existence, and its triumphant emergence from the catacombs.
Kateryna – Sister Klavdiya Koretska was born in the village of Veren, in the Lviv region, into a large family – she had five sisters and four brothers.
"When I was 13 years old, I fell seriously ill, and many people thought that I would die. For a month I had a fever; the priest was even called," Sister Klavdiya says in her autobiography.
She recovered. And in the spring of 1931 when she was 19 years old, she met with the nuns of the Congregation of St. Joseph. Her older sister Rozalia was staying there. During one of her visits to the convent, the prioress asked Kateryna to think about a religious vocation.
The same year, Kateryna visited to the sisters in Lviv, who were serving the juvenate of the Redemptorist Fathers. In 1933, she took her first vows, and in 1939, her final vows. During the violent liquidation of the UGCC, she kept in touch with the Josephite Sisters, underground Greek Catholic priests, and worked various jobs – as a telephone operator, in a hospital, with children.
Today Sister Klavdiya lives in a monastery building in Lviv. For her birthday the nuns baked a large cake, on which they wrote "101 years" with frosting.
"Sister Klavdiya now only prays – she no longer performs monastic duties. She walks, talks, listens, sees," says Sister Rafayila Hodiy, the chief secretary of the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The secretary says that Sister Klavdiya has relatives who visit her on weekends. Earlier the nun loved to embroider.
"I’ve known Sister Klavdiya for about fifteen years,” says Sister Rafayila. “She is an extremely good, balanced, and pious woman. She always prays. All our sisters are extremely fond of her."
