The annual Red Mass, sponsored by the St. Thomas More Society of the Diocese of Wilmington, is scheduled for Oct. 6 at 4 p.m. at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Church in Greenville. The Mass is for members of the legal profession and takes place near the beginning of the judicial year.
This year, Bishop Koenig will preside. The homilist will be Archbishop Borys Gudziak, metropolitan archbishop of Philadelphia of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
This is the 37th annual Red Mass in the diocese. The St. Thomas More Society began its existence in the Diocese of Wilmington with the Red Mass on Oct. 4, 1988, with Bishop Robert Mulvee, Msgr. Paul Taggart and several other priests. Father Robert Kennedy of the Catholic University of America delivered the homily, according to the St. Thomas More Society.
The Mass was held on weekday mornings for its first three years before moving to weekdays after work from 1991-96, all at the St. Peter Cathedral. It moved to a Sunday, at a regular 11 a.m. Mass, in 1997 and again the next year. It moved to St. Joseph’s Church on French Street after that and has been at St. Joe’s on the Brandywine for several years.
Archbishop Gudziak, 63, grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., to Ukrainian immigrant parents. He earned degrees in philosophy and biology from Syracuse University before going to Rome, where he received a degree in theology. He holds a doctorate from Harvard University in Slavic and Byzantine Cultural and Ecclesiastical History.
For 10 years, beginning in 1992, Archishop Gudziak lived in Lviv, Ukraine, where he founded and directed the Institute of Church History, according to his biography on his diocesan website. He also served as vice rector and rector of the Lviv Theological Academy, and in 2002 he became rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University before becoming its president in 2013.
Ordained in 1998, he became a bishop in 2012 of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. He was appointed to his current position in February 2018, which he assumed formally in 2019, according to his biography.
He has received numerous awards and distinctions, and in 2022 Pope Francis named Archbishop Gudziak a member of the Dicastery for Communication. In the fall of that year, he began his term as chairman of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
