Pavol Petro Gojdič

He was born on 17 July 1888 in Ruske Pekľany in the family of a Greek-Catholic priest Stefan Gojdič and his wife Anne Gerbery. He studied theology in Prešov and Budapest. In 1911 he was ordained a priest in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Prešov. Subsequently, he worked in Cigeľka and Prešov. On July 20, 1922, he entered the Basilian monastery on Černeč Mountain near Mukačevo, where he took the monastic name „Pavel“.

In 1926 he was appointed apostolic administrator of the Prešov eparchy. He was consecrated bishop on 25 March 1927 in the Basilica of St. Clement in Rome by Bishop Dionýz Nyáradi of Križevac, who had been the Apostolic Administrator of Prešov until then. On 8 August 1940, he was enthroned in Prešov as the resident bishop of Prešov, and on 15 January 1946, his jurisdiction over the Greek Catholics in the whole of Czechoslovakia was confirmed.

When after 1948 the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia undertook to abolish the Greek Catholic Church in Slovakia, following the example of the USSR, on April 28, 1950, during the anti-church action called the „Prešov Sobor“, vladyka Gojdič was arrested and interned, and at the same time the Greek Catholic Church was administratively abolished as well. In a fabricated trial, Gojdič was sentenced to life imprisonment along with Bishops Vojtaššák and Buzalek for treason. 

He died as a result of torture and ill-treatment in Leopold Prison on 17 July 1960, on his 72nd birthday. He was buried in the prison cemetery and his grave was marked only with the number 681.

On 29 October 1968, his remains were exhumed and taken to Prešov and placed in the Chapel of the Apostles Peter and Paul. Since 1990 they have been kept in a sarcophagus in the chapel of the Greek Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Prešov. On 4 November 2001, Paul Petro Gojdič was beatified by Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. On the occasion of the 7th anniversary of the establishment of independent Slovakia, Bishop Pavol Petro Gojdič was awarded the Pribina Cross of the First Class in memoriam by the Government of the Slovak Republic.

Source: https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavol_Petro_Gojdič
Photo source: Author Unknown - Erzeparchie Prestov - www.grkatpo.sk/historia_biskupi, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8551906