Franko Diakowsky has served as a subdeacon at St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Toronto, Ontario since 2015 and has prepared liturgical texts in Ukrainian and English for publication since 2013.

Slums, Street Preachers and the Spirit of God: The Emergence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Eastern Canada in the Context of the Early 20th Century Immigrant Experience
The cities of Eastern Canada in which the Ukrainian Orthodox Church took root in the early 1920s were vastly different places from those which welcomed waves of Ukrainian immigrants following the Second World War; in which Ukrainian communities flourished throughout the 1960s and 70s; and which continue to see new generations of Ukrainian immigrants arriving today. An unquenchable New World appetite for development has seen the abandonment of industries where the first Ukrainians worked; subsumed whole neighbourhoods where they lived; toppled once-indispensable community landmarks where they met; and left echoing shadows of the people and the ideas that sustained them. This presentation seeks to recover the context of a vanished time and place in order to rediscover the animating idea that allowed the Church to set down roots in Ontario and Quebec.