St Anthony of Padua Parish (Horodnytsia)

The earliest written reference to Horodnytsia dates to 1390, although the settlement is considered to have been founded in 1127. It was a township centre from at least the nineteenth century. By the end of that century, it had nearly 2,200 residents, but only 1,267 in 1911; today, it has more than 5,300. It was a district centre from 1923 to 1957 and received urban-type settlement status on 10 December 1938.

The town’s Latin-rite Catholics belonged to the Parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Korets. In 1802, the local landowning Lubomirski family funded a dependent wooden chapel in Horodnytsia. The subsequent owners, the Rulikowski family, restored it in 1874. From at least 1876, diocesan directories for Lutsk-Zhytomyr list Horodnytsia as a mission of the Korets parish. At that time, it had its own priest, Fr Franz Kondratskyi; in 1889, it was served by Fr Yakym Lipskyi.

By 1911, Horodnytsia was a separate parish. In 1914, Fr Antonii Buzhynskyi administered it, serving about 3,400 faithful. The local chapel was still wooden, but through his efforts it was replaced by the present masonry church, built after 1916. In the first half of the 1920s, parishioner numbers remained broadly unchanged. They were served by administrators Fr Yosyf Hraievskyi in 1920, Fr Sigizmund Klemchynskyi in 1921–1923, and Fr Vasyl Stsislo from the parish in Yemilchyne in at least 1925.

The church in Horodnytsia was later closed and used, among other things, as a butter factory. In the post-Soviet period, the faithful recovered and restored it under the title of St Anthony of Padua. Today, Horodnytsia is served by diocesan priests from Christ the King of the Universe Parish in Zviahel, formerly Novohrad-Volynskyi.