Andrés Sapelak
Andrés Sapelak (Andrzej Sapelak; Ukrainian: Андрій Михайлович Сапеляк) was an important figure in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church who served mainly in Argentina.
He was born on December 13, 1919, in Ryszkowa Wola, then part of the Second Polish Republic, to a Ukrainian family. He joined the Salesians of Saint John Bosco and was ordained a priest on June 29, 1949.
Sapelak became Auxiliary Bishop for the Ukrainian Catholics in Argentina and Titular Bishop of Sebastopolis on October 15, 1961. He was later appointed bishop of the Eparchy of Santa María del Patrocinio en Buenos Aires, and served there from 1968 until his retirement in 1997.
After retiring, he returned to Ukraine and worked as a parish priest in Verkhnodniprovsk in the Ukrainian Catholic Archiepiscopal Exarchate of Donetsk–Kharkiv from 1999 to 2014. He became a Ukrainian citizen in 2013.
Andrés Sapelak died on November 6, 2017, in the Salesian house in Vynnyky near Lviv, where he had lived since 2014. At the time of his death he was the oldest bishop in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 20:41 (CET).