Michael (Khoroshy) of Toronto

His Beatitude Metropolitan Michael (Khoroshy), (secular: Theodot Nykyforovych Khoroshy) was born in the village of Fedorivka, near Chyhyryn, Ukraine, on July 10, 1885. He reposed in the Lord, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on May 5, 1977, and is buried in the Prospect Cemetery in Toronto.

Ukraine

Theodot Khoroshy began his early education in his village until moving on to the pedagogical seminary in the town of Shamivka in the Kherson region of Ukraine. Following that, he studied at the Theological Seminary and the Faculty of History-Philology of St. Vladimir's Seminary in Kyiv. In December 1912, Bishop Nicodemus ordained young Theodot a deacon, and during his few years as a deacon, he translated the Liturgical Psalter into Ukrainian. On April 24, 1920, Bishop Dimitrius (Verbytsky) ordained him a priest, and in the following month's was appointed Dean of the church in the village of Ternivka in the Cherkasy region.

The young priest was very hard at work with the Bolshevik occupation bringing terrible destruction to ecclesiastical life, and despite the pressure on clergy to deny their vocation, Fr. Theodot was a great soldier of Christ, and was unshaken. Due to his outstanding clergy work, in 1923 Fr. Theodot was appointed the Dean of the Cathedral in the city of Cherkasy.

With the final attack of the Bolsheviks on the Church, the communist authorities arrested Fr. Theodot in September 1929, and was condemned to 8 years in concentration camps in the far north; first on the Kola peninsula on the White Sea, then the "Island of Death"-Kond, and a year later-to Solovky. In the fall of 1932 he was transfered to the camps of Ukhta-Pechersk for further punishment. Following his release in 1937, Fr. Theodot returned to the Donbas area in Ukraine, and established himself in Kirovohrad.