Religious Leader. The first Bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Canada, Blessed Nykyta Budka was born in Dobomirka in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire, present day Ukraine, and was ordained to the priesthood on October 25, 1905. Appointed exarch of the Apostolic Ukranian Exarchate of Canada, he received his episcopal consecration with the titular see of Patara on October 13, 1912 from Archbishop Andreas Alexander Szeptycki OSBM. Arriving in Canada two months later, the tasks reserved for Budka as the first ordinary were enormous, as his diocese stretched from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, counting some 150,000 Ukrainians and approximately 80 churches and chapels with just thirteen secular priests and nine monks to serve all. While his work focused mainly on visiting the faithful and organizing new parish communities, Bishop Budka worked hard on the Incorporation Act to legally safeguard church property and wealth which before his arrival was often the cause of misunderstandings and sometimes led to divisions within parishes. While no less was his concern for the education of the youth, he directed much of his effort to building educational institutes and boarding houses for Ukrainian students and organizing parochial schools and catechism instruction for children. Of great assistance to the him were the Sister Servants of Mary Immaculate who worked tirelessly among the his people. In 1927, after fifteen years of hard work, Bishop Nykyta returned to Europe to compile and submit his report on the work accomplished to the church authorities in Rome. As his health did not permit him to return to Canada, for sometime he served as vicar general to Metropolitan Sheptytsky in Lviv where he was eventually arrested by the Bolsheviks in 1945 and exiled to Siberia. Dying at a gulag in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, at seventy two years of age, the camp guards took his body out of the camp and left it in the woods to be eaten by wild animals. A group of prisoners who tried to locate his body the following day, found nothing more than a shirt sleeve, his clothes having been left on the body as a sign of respect. Budka was beatified in a Byzatine rite ceremony by Pope John Paul II in Lviv on June 27, 2001.