HIDDEN TREASURES

(article from December 2004 Newsletter)

THE ADVENTURE began when two young Basilian sisters came to the Shrine in the summer of 2003. They informed us of a house that the Basilian sisters owned in Lviv, one that they would soon sell. They were worried about it because Blessed Vasyl had hidden some documents in the garden. The nuns had been digging but they could not find them. If those documents weren’t found soon, they could be lost forever.

This past spring, May 2004, Mary Jane Kalenchuk and Fr. John Sianchuk went to Ukraine to do research on Blessed Vasyl Velychkovsky, especially to interview those who knew him personally. In the back of their minds was this hidden treasure. Was it still there? Would they be able to find it? On their second day of interviews they spoke to the Basilian sisters from that very house. The sisters remembered preparing a flask for some important documents Blessed Vasyl had had with him. But where they were buried, they did not exactly know. The sister that did the actual digging and burying was out of town. No sooner was this conversation finishing, when who walks in, Sr. Teofilia, the one who buried them. She took Fr. John outside and showed him the approximate area where it was buried, about a meter square between a pear tree and a walnut tree. But that was almost 40 years ago. The pear tree had grown to become a huge tree, while the walnut tree had died and was only a stump.

The following week Mary Jane and Fr. John returned with some Redemptorist seminarians to do a dig. The digging began normally but soon the roots appeared. Of course the roots weren’t there forty years ago. With much difficulty a meter square hole about 80 cm deep was dug, but no hidden treasure was found. Finally, when they were about to give up, one of the sisters asked if they could remove the old stump since it was already half dug up. As they began digging around the stump, suddenly a plastic bag was unearthed. In that bag was a brown jar and in that jar was something wrapped in plastic. With great jubilation this treasure was brought from the earth, only to hear from the sisters that that wasn’t it. They had placed the documents in a different type of bottle.

Carefully the jar was opened, the contents taken out and unwrapped. The paper was very moist and therefore was not opened until later that evening after they had dried somewhat. That evening they discovered three documents from the jar. Very carefully they were unfolded to prevent as little damage to the documents as possible. One document was from the Basilian fathers from Rome dated May 3, 1967. The second document was typed with no letterhead or signature, having only some pen markings at the bottom. This document had instructions about life in the underground Church. The third document was typed on a piece of cloth with instructions to a bishop. Later they deduced that all three came from Rome with the last two from Cardinal Josyf Slipyj. These were certainly precious documents, but the sisters were convinced that this was not the bottle which they buried. Unfortunately the sister who buried the documents had left the city and was not available.

However, within minutes who walked in miraculously, if not Sr. Teofilia. She too immediately said that it was not the bottle, but after looking at the documents her memory became clearer and she said that perhaps at the last moment they changed bottles since the one they had prepared was too small. But she wasn’t 100% sure. The next day upon returning to the site of the dig, one of the sisters living at the home asked whether one of the documents was a cloth. This confirmed that indeed these were the documents Blessed Vasyl buried in 1967. When the sister heard what the documents contained, she grabbed her head and said that if those documents were ever found in their house, they would have all been arrested and imprisoned or perhaps even worse, accused of being spies of the Vatican and the West.