Feast Day: March 25 Beatified: June 27, 2001 — Pope Saint John Paul II (Lviv, Ukraine, Byzantine rite liturgy) Order / Vocation: Greek Catholic (Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church) — married priest; six children; parish priest of Saint Nicholas, Peremyshliany Patron of: Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (proclaimed Patron of Priests, 2009) · Priests who serve persecuted peoples · Those who risk their lives to protect others
"Here we are all equal: Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Latvians and Estonians. Of all these here I am the only priest. I cannot even imagine how it would be here without me. Here I see God, who is the same for us all, regardless of our religious distinctions." — Blessed Emilian Kovch, letter from Majdanek concentration camp, 1943
The Question the Gestapo Asked Three Times
Gestapo officer: Did you know that it is prohibited to baptize Jews? Father Kovch: I didn't know anything. Gestapo officer: Do you now know it? Father Kovch: Yes. Gestapo officer: Will you continue to do it? Father Kovch: Of course.
This exchange — preserved in the CatholicSaints.info entry on Blessed Emilian Kovch, sourced from the Gestapo interrogation record — is the hinge of his biography. He had been baptizing Jews in Peremyshliany since the German occupation began, issuing them baptismal certificates that listed them as Christians, giving them a document that might save their lives when the SS came looking for Jews to deport. The Nazis knew what he was doing. He refused to stop. They sent him to Majdanek.
He did not consider this a tragedy. He said so, in letters smuggled out of the camp, with a directness that leaves no room for pious embellishment: "I thank God for His goodness to me. Apart from heaven, this is the one place where I wish to remain."
He died in the ovens of Majdanek on March 25, 1944 — the feast of the Annunciation, the feast of Saint Dismas, the feast on which God entered flesh and on which the Good Thief was received into Paradise. He had been prisoner number 2399 in Barrack 14. He had spent his months in the camp hearing confessions, celebrating Mass in corners of barracks, giving the Last Rites to everyone who was dying regardless of their faith. He was the only priest in the camp. He could not imagine anyone else being there instead.
Born in the Carpathians, Formed in Rome
Emilian Kovch was born on August 20, 1884, in the village of Kosmach in southern Galicia — in the Carpathian Mountains of what was then Austria-Hungary, in the Hutsul region where the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had its roots deep in the soil and the culture of the mountain people. His father, Gregory Kovch, was himself a Greek Catholic priest — in the Eastern Catholic tradition, married men may be ordained to the priesthood, though monks and bishops remain celibate.
The son followed the father into the priesthood, but first traveled to Rome. He studied at the College of Saints Sergius and Bacchus — the Greek Catholic college in Rome — and at the Urbaniana University of the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith, receiving the theological formation that his later ministry would draw on. He returned to Galicia, married Maria-Anna Dobrzynska in 1910, and was ordained a priest in 1911 by Bishop Hryhoriy Khomyshyn. They had six children.
He served briefly in Bosnia — in Kozarac, where his parishioners were poor Ukrainian emigrants living in difficult conditions. From 1921 he served as pastor of the Church of Saint Nicholas in Peremyshliany, a small town approximately thirty miles from Lviv. He served there for twenty-two years, until the Gestapo arrested him on December 30, 1942.
Peremyshliany Under German Occupation
Before the war, more than half of Peremyshliany's population was Jewish. When the Germans arrived in June 1941, the persecution began immediately. Father Emilian's response was also immediate. When German soldiers locked Jewish men inside the burning synagogue, Father Kovch ran to the building and in fluent German ordered the soldiers to stop. They were so shocked that they dispersed. He pulled survivors from the flames.
As Jews were ghettoized and deportations to the death camps began, desperate families came to Father Kovch. He catechized them, baptized them, and issued them baptismal certificates that documented their new Christian status — more than 600 certificates in total, according to the historical record. He knew the Nazis had prohibited this. He continued.
He was arrested in December 1942. Metropolitan Sheptytsky, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, made strenuous efforts for his release. Family members appealed. The Nazis offered to release him on condition that he promise to stop baptizing Jews. He declined.
He was sent to Majdanek on August 31, 1943.
The Last Letter
On the night before his death, he wrote to his family from the camp hospital where he had been moved as his health failed:
"I understand that you are trying to get me released. But I beg you not to do this. Yesterday they killed fifty people. If I am not here, who will help them to get through these sufferings? They would go on their way to eternity with all their sins and in the depths of unbelief, which would take them to hell. But now they go to death with their heads held aloft, leaving all their sins behind them. And so they pass over to the eternal city."
He died on March 25, 1944. The official cause of death was recorded as heart failure. He was fifty-nine years old. His body was burned in the camp crematorium.
On January 9, 1999, the Jewish Council of Ukraine proclaimed him Righteous of Ukraine. On June 27, 2001, Pope Saint John Paul II beatified him in Lviv together with twenty-six other servants of God, in a Byzantine rite liturgy. On April 24, 2009, the Synod of Bishops of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church proclaimed him Patron of Priests of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
He is for the priest who cannot leave the people who are dying. He is for the one who, offered release on a condition, declines the condition. He is for those who find God most clearly in the places where God seems most absent — in a concentration camp barracks, among the Poles and Jews and Ukrainians and Latvians dying together in Barrack 14, where a Greek Catholic priest from the Carpathians saw, in every face, the same God.
Prayer to Blessed Emilian Kovch
O God, who in Blessed Emilian Kovch gave a priest the grace to see Your face in every prisoner of every faith and to serve them all without distinction until the ovens took him, grant through his intercession that priests may never calculate the cost of pastoral fidelity, that those who protect the persecuted may do so without counting the risk, and that we may see, as he saw, that here — wherever suffering is — You are. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Blessed Emilian Kovch, pray for us.
| Born | August 20, 1884 — Kosmach, Kosiv region, Galicia (present-day Ukraine) |
| Died | March 25, 1944 — Majdanek concentration camp, Lublin, Poland — gassed and burned in the ovens |
| Feast Day | March 25 |
| Order / Vocation | Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church — married priest; six children; parish priest, Saint Nicholas, Peremyshliany (1921–1943) |
| Beatified | June 27, 2001 — Pope Saint John Paul II (Lviv, Ukraine, Byzantine rite liturgy) |
| Body | Cremated in the ovens of Majdanek — no remains; monument erected at Majdanek State Museum, March 25, 2021 |
| Patron of | Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (Patron of Priests, proclaimed 2009) · Priests who serve persecuted peoples |
| Known as | Omelyan Kovch · Emilian Kowcz · Pastor of Majdanek · Prisoner No. 2399 |
| Their words | "Here I see God, who is the same for us all, regardless of our religious distinctions." / "Apart from heaven, this is the one place where I wish to remain." |
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