Josyp terelya biography of rory

Josyp Terelya is a Ukrainian Catholic who, along with many other lay people, helped keep the faith alive in the underground church during the communist regime, after most of the clergy had been either killed, imprisoned or expelled. He was zealous and out-spoken and became such a thorn in the side of the KGB that whenever he spoke, he was arrested; whenever he was imprisoned he promptly escaped, even from their maximum security prisons, the church’s answer to Houdini.

Eventually they lost patience and decided to kill him. In solitary confinement, cell 21, they planned to freeze him to death. In this way they could avoid all the paperwork of a formal execution. “It was the middle of winter and they were forcing in frigid air. The walls were coated with ice so thick you could make it ring by tapping an object against it. They stripped me of my winter clothes, leaving me there in a light shirt. In half an hour I felt my j