Ten years ago, last month, the Synod of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church took a striking decision: it elected its youngest member, 40-year old Bishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, as leader of the largest of the eastern Catholic Churches, a choice confirmed by Pope Benedict XVI. In the ensuing decade, what appeared bold and even risky now seems brilliant and providential. For Major-Archbishop Shevchuk has become one of the world's most dynamic Catholic leaders under exceptionally challenging circumstances. From 1946 until 1990, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church [UGCC] was the world's biggest underground religious community, officially "dissolved" in 1946 by a bogus "synod" engineered by the Soviet Union's secret police in connivance with the Russian Orthodox Church. With many of its leaders murdered in the Gulag, the UGCC in Ukraine survived underground for over four decades: worshipping in forests, conducting clandestine educational institutions (including the rudiments of seminaries), and praying for the day when it could live openly as a Catholic community, Byzantine in liturgical expression and organizational structure but fully in communion with the Bishop of Rome. During those harsh decades, the UGCC's presence increased in the Ukrainian diaspora in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. But in its eastern European homeland, the Ukrainian Church was in desperate straits.