Protodeacon Arkady Voloshchuk fell asleep in the Lord early Sunday morning, September 15, 2024, at the age of 89
Born on February 8, 1935 in the Rovno Oblast of Soviet Ukraine into a family of Orthodox clergymen, Pdn. Arkady, despite threats and pressures from officials, enrolled and graduated from the Minsk Theological Seminary at the Zhirovichi Monastery, where he also served as one of the directors of the brotherhood choir. After completing compulsory military service in the engineering corps of the post-WWII Soviet Army, he married, was ordained deacon in 1958, and assigned to serve at the cathedral in Vologda. Raised to the rank of protodeacon, Pdn. Arkady was transferred to Kursk in the mid-1970s and later to Kharkov (now Kharkiv) in the early 1980s to serve under Metropolitan Nikodim (Rusnak) at the Annunciation Cathedral. There, at the Kharkov Council of May 1992, which elected Vladimir (Sabodan), in absentia, as Metropolitan of Kiev and All Ukraine, Pdn. Arkady served as first deacon.
Despite Pdn. Arkady’s position of honor as the Metropolitan Nikodim’s senior protodeacon, he was compelled by family circumstances to relocate to Los Angeles, CA in 1996, where he joined the clergy of Holy Virgin Mary Russian Orthodox Cathedral (OCA), serving under Bishop Tikhon (Fitzgerald) and subsequently under Archbishop Benjamin (Peterson). After his retirement in 2020, Pdn. Arkady was, due to infirmity, unable to attend services and prayed at home. When the opportunity arose, he enjoyed fishing, which he had mastered as a young boy, providing for his family and neighbors during the famines under Stalin.
Over the course of Pdn. Arkady’s 66 years of service to the Holy Church under eight ruling bishops and two metropolitans, and having served on multiple occasions with the Moscow Patriarchs Aleksy I, Pimen, and Aleksy II, he was honored with the ecclesiastical orders of St. Alexander Nevsky, St. Sergius of Radonezh, and St. Vladimir, as well as various diocesan awards.
Pdn. Arkady was predeceased by only four months by his beloved Matushka Raisa Nesterovna, a decades-long parish school teacher and church singer. His four siblings and his son, also, predeceased him. He is survived by his two daughters and four grandchildren. His uncle, Priest Epifanii Voloshchuk, was martyred by the invading Germans in 1944 for defending his flock against Nazi oppression and is venerated locally as a Confessor of the Faith and a hero in the village of Mokrovo in southern Belarus.
Pdn. Arkady will be remembered by the parishioners of Holy Virgin Mary Cathedral for distinctive, beautiful serving style. Well into his eighties, he took bus transportation with several connections and walked to get to church, and still was always the first to arrive. Then, at his bench across the parking lot facing the altar of the church, he prepared his voice and himself for service at the Divine Liturgy.
The funeral service for Protodeacon Arkady, followed by interment, is scheduled for 10:00 AM on Monday, September 23, 2024 at Holy Virgin Mary Cathedral, Los Angeles, CA.
May Protodeacon Arkady’s memory be eternal!