Simon Fedorońko

Holy Hieromartyr Simon Fedorońko was born on 21 August 1893 in Czertéz near Sanok in Galicia, into a peasant family that originally belonged to the Greek Catholic Church. He studied at the Orthodox seminary in Zhytomyr and was ordained priest in 1914. In 1915 he went to Kyiv, where he worked at the side of Metropolitan Evlogy.

From 1922 he served as a military priest in the Polish army, at Przemyśl, Lublin and Warsaw, and became the chief Orthodox chaplain of the army, with the rank of colonel. In November 1935 he celebrated in the garrison church of Praga, a district of Warsaw, the first Orthodox liturgy in Polish in the restored Poland. He was an adviser to Metropolitan Dionysius.

In September 1939 he was taken prisoner by the Soviets, held in Moscow and then, from 11 April 1940, in the camp at Kozelsk. On 30 April 1940 he was shot by the NKVD in the forest of Katyn. All three of his sons died in the war in 1944: Orest and Vyacheslav fell in the Warsaw Uprising as soldiers of the Home Army, and Alexander in the west, near Mannheim. In 2018 he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle posthumously.

The Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church decided on 18 March 2025, at the session of its Council of Bishops, to canonize the martyrs of the Katyn massacre, among them these three priests, together with other clergy and faithful whose names God alone knows. The solemn proclamation took place on 16 September 2025 in the church of Holy Wisdom (Saint Sophia) in Warsaw, where Metropolitan Sawa read the act of canonization and the icon of the new martyrs was presented.