Andrey Sheptytsky

Andrey Sheptytsky, referred to in the narrative as Monseigneur Andrey or Monseigneur Sheptytsky, is a Greek Catholic bishop whose influence reaches beyond church affairs into education and public life. Though he rarely appears directly, accounts of his work present him as a figure able to turn institutional authority into personal persuasion, while his prominence also places him within the unstable, multilingual society of Galicia around 1900.

Identity and Background

Sheptytsky was ordained a priest in 1892 and became bishop of Stanislaviv in 1899. In 1900 he became metropolitan of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, a position he held until his death in 1944. The church retained the Eastern rite, including its liturgy and Julian calendar, while remaining part of the Catholic Church; its practice also permitted married men to be ordained priests. Sheptytsky’s authority therefore belongs to a religious institution shaped by both Eastern traditions and its relationship with Rome.

Civic Patronage in Stanislaviv

The narrative links Sheptytsky’s church leadership to the physical and educational landscape of Stanislaviv. At number 16 on Lindengasse, his residence occupied a house that had been neglected in the 1880s by the widow of the lawyer Przybylowski. Count Potocki bought the property and ceremonially gave it to the Church. Although the prospect of raising enough donations to restore it had seemed doubtful, the restoration was completed, and the building had housed two archbishops named Julian before Sheptytsky.

Sheptytsky also acquired and donated a building for a Greek Catholic seminary, whose construction had begun across from Madame Szczepanska’s house. At dinner, Adèle points to the coming seminary as an achievement of his efforts, while Petro adds that Sheptytsky has agreed to participate in creating a Ukrainian high school, though he doubts the project will succeed. Together these initiatives make his public role concrete: he helps secure buildings and institutional space for religious and Ukrainian education in the city.

Mission and Pastoral Influence

Josef recounts traveling with Sheptytsky on an apostolic mission among the Hutsuls of Kosiv. In his description, the people’s lives are marked by drunkenness, idleness, disorder in their homes, and customs he considers irreverent. The account is mediated through Josef’s judgments, but its focus shifts when he describes Sheptytsky preaching and hearing confessions: listeners’ eyes fill with tears, and repentance becomes visible in their faces.

Sheptytsky’s effectiveness, as Josef tells it, rests on finding words that reach what has been buried or neglected in people’s souls. He speaks to them in their own language and confronts them with the brevity of bodily life and the need to consider the state of the soul. Josef admires the bishop’s ability to address his audience in terms that make spiritual responsibility immediate. The episode contrasts his direct pastoral appeal with the scolding moral catalogue that precedes it.

Public Authority and Narrative Significance

Sheptytsky’s work is presented alongside a growing wave of thefts from Christian and Jewish places of worship. In Stanislaviv, Petro and Josef discuss the missing valuables and relics; Josef asks whether the disappearances coincide with performances by Ernest Thorn, the magician and swindler. The stolen objects include an ancient monstrance from the cathedral at Ozeriany, while reports from Jewish communities describe missing ritual objects as losses to sacred life, not merely property. The novel ultimately gathers many of these objects together in the stone woman’s jar, linking the scattered reports to the household’s concealed trove. Sheptytsky is not identified as responsible for solving the thefts; rather, his ecclesiastical position places him within a religious world unsettled by the disappearances and competing explanations of them.

The character also complicates the public language of imperial loyalty. A newspaper marking Emperor Franz Joseph’s seventieth birthday praises the monarch for granting Galicia political recognition and room for local development. Set beside Sheptytsky’s efforts to establish Ukrainian institutions, that celebration shows how regional initiatives operate within imperial structures rather than outside them. His significance lies in this double scale: he is a church leader whose influence is expressed through intimate acts of preaching and practical local patronage, and a public figure in a province whose apparent order coexists with uncertainty and change.