Stepan Kachala

Stepan Kachala (Ukrainian Степан Качала, Polish Stefan Kaczała) (1815 – 1888) was a Ukrainian politician and writer.

Born in Firlejów near Berezhany, he graduated from a gymnasium in Berezhany and then the Lviv seminary. In 1842, he became a Greek-Catholic priest. [http://www.irp.te.ua/content/topicpage/?category_id=43574538&item_id=447585690]

In the late 1860s, a Galician priest, Father Stepan Kachala, made an inquiry into the causes of the Ukrainian peasant’s poverty and then formulated a social program that the Greek Catholic clergy as a whole soonadopted for its own. He did not find the roots of the peasant’s poverty where secular investigators have suggested these roots lay: in theinequitable terms of emancipation, in the transition to a money economy,and in the absence of factory industry to absorb the surplus labor in the countryside. Instead, Father Kalacha found the peasant guilty of vices that led to his impoverishment: drunkenness, prodigality, and sloth. As antidotes to these vices, he suggested, among other things, abstinence, thrift, and enterprise. [http://www.huri.harvard.edu/pdf/hus_volumes/vII_n2june1978.pdf]

From 1861, Rev Stepan Kachala was a Ukrainian representative to the Galician Sejm, and a head of the Ruthenian Club (Ukrainian "Руськiй клуб", Polish "Klub Ruski") in the parliament in 1883-1888.

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