Meet Ukraine’s Father Roman Lohish

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by Petro Didula

“It’s very important to have a good example in life,” says Father Roman Lohish, a Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest who has earned a reputation as an excellent teacher and mentor among parishioners with children in and around the city of Lviv in western Ukraine.

“My example was Bishop Mykhail Siabryha,” he says of the bishop, whom he met in the 1980’s when Ukraine’s Communist authorities still prohibited the church.

“We didn’t have churches. The Divine Liturgy was celebrated out in the open,” recalls Father Lohish. “As a boy, I was really impressed by Bishop Mykhail, an exceptionally intelligent yet very simple man who always remained with his people, regardless of hardships and difficulties. I didn’t read about ministry in books, but I saw it with my own eyes. For me, those people who served in the underground church are open books of the history of my church. I continue ‘reading’ these books, and they inspire me as a priest, as a person who is above all called to serve.”

Ordained in 2007, Father Lohish has since served as pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in Lviv. The church, which functions as the chapel for the Redemptorist community of Lviv, caters to the area’s vibrant and growing Greek Catholic community.

Soon after assuming his pastoral duties, the young priest created a special Sunday liturgy for families with children. His idea was to involve children as much as possible in the service to help them understand and appreciate the faith and its traditions.

Instead of adult parishioners, children assist in the celebration of the liturgy. A child reads the epistle. Another leads the recital of the Nicene Creed and the children together sing the responses. For the Our Father, the children gather around the altar in a circle and, holding hands, recite the prayer.

Children also play an active part in the homily. “It’s a dialogue,” explains Father Lohish, who frequently stops and asks the children questions about what he just said. “I never know what they’ll answer. Sometimes I must say we have very intelligent, theological children. It’s unbelievable.”

The family Divine Liturgy has proved a huge success. “We never advertised the children’s liturgy,” says Father Lohish. Nevertheless, word of it spread fast and far, attracting families to the church from all over the city, well beyond the parish’s traditional boundaries. One family faithfully comes from more than 16 miles away.

“More than 90 kids came to our little church for the one Sunday liturgy. So we started a second,” continues the priest, who now celebrates the family liturgy twice every Sunday.

Parishioners and the community at large quickly took note of Father Lohish’s exceptional pedagogical talents as well as his impeccable English. Faculty at a local public school that emphasizes English acquisition recently approached the young priest about teaching catechism class in English. Father Lohish accepted the assignment without hesitation.

The faculty, however, warned him that the students at the school tend to come from wealthy families and lack discipline. “The teachers often tell me,” says Father Lohish, “that these kids don’t have good examples; they’re very spoiled. And that’s true, but what to do? How do you show them the true face of a loving God? This requires us to do a little more than to be an educator who explains how to live correctly, to think, to conceptualize. A priest should be something different than what they usually come across in their lives.

“During Lent, they came to me to make their confessions and it turned out that, for most of them, their lessons with me were, in fact, their only experience of contact with the church. As a result, they came to church on Easter — and not because their parents once taught them this. Simply because I once had the opportunity to talk with them about various things that deeply touch them as persons. One of them told me: ‘I came to church because you are there.’ ”

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