Catholic Imagination: His Eminence Mykola Cardinal Bychok

Name: Catholic Imagination: His Eminence Mykola Cardinal Bychok
Start: 2026-04-22T18:30:00+10:00
End: 2026-04-22T18:30:00+10:00
Location: Catholic Leadership Centre

About

Formation – visible signs of invisible grace, sacramentality, imagination.

His Eminence Mykola Cardinal Bychok C.Ss.R. has served as Eparch of Saints Peter and Paul of Melbourne, Australia since 2020. Pope Francis made him a cardinal on 7 December 2024, making him the youngest member of the College of Cardinals and youngest elector in the 2025 papal conclave.

His first ministry was to the coal-mining city in Siberia, where he was the pastor of Ukrainian Greek-Catholics descended from those exiled or forcibly resettled by the Soviets in the 1950s and 60s.

Here, celebrating the Divine Liturgy in apartments or private homes, sometimes with merely a handful of parishioners, he leant how faith formation depends upon the visible signs of invisible grace through sacramentality. Amongst 300 km journeys in the snow where the faith was hard fought a sense of the Catholic imagination is vital: “It was like the first Christians.”

As a member of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church (UGCC), the largest of the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches in full communion with the Pope, his elevation to cardinal, “is a huge responsibility, not only for the church in Australia, in Ukraine, but worldwide.”