Our Lady of the Angels Parish (Potiivka)

The village of Potiivka in the Zhytomyr region is believed to date from the 1580s and was originally called Lozhnytsi.

Documents from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries use two names, Veremiivka and Potiivka, but only the latter remained in use from the nineteenth century onwards. In the 1880s, the village had about 570 residents; in the early twentieth century, about a thousand; and today, more than 1,700.

Potiivka’s Latin-rite Catholics belonged to the Parish of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Horbuliv, Zhytomyr Region. By the early twentieth century, they numbered three hundred, but they had no church of their own.

In 1996, the Catholics of Potiivka converted an ordinary wooden village house into a chapel. In 2000, the adapted chapel was blessed by Jan Purwiński, Bishop of Kyiv-Zhytomyr. Today, the small local Catholic community is served by diocesan priests from St Anne Parish in Malyn.