The Greek Catholic Seminary in Lviv was founded in 1783 by Austrian Emperor Joseph II during the episcopate of Petro Bilyanskiy. It was designated for the formation of priests from the lands of modern Ukraine, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Croatia. From the time of its founding the seminary was both a respected institute for theological studies and a center for the formation of national, scholarly and cultural consciousness for Halychyna and the Ukrainian people. With the seminary as a basis, the Greek Catholic Theological Academy was created in 1929, with the initiative and the blessing of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky under the rectorship of Josyf Slipyi (later Cardinal and Major Archbishop). Metropolitan Sheptytsky intended to create a single scholarly center, in which all seminarians, those intending to marry and those planning to be celibate, would have the same high level of knowledge.

But the events of World War II thwarted these great plans. The Lviv Seminary was closed for the first time in 1939 with the arrival of the Red Army in Lviv and then closed more permanently in 1944. In 1945 the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was declared illegal and forcibly joined to the Russian Orthodox Church by Joseph Stalin. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was the largest illegal church in the world for over four decades. Church life, including seminary education, continued underground.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church became public and legal again. In 1992 the seminary resumed operations, though in a different location, because the Soviets had seized and reallocated all church property. The newly independent Ukrainian government offered the eparchy a former Pioneer (Scout) summer camp in Rudno, an adjoining suburb of Lviv. Since that time, the number of vocations to the priesthood has been high.

The seminary was re-opened but the former students of the late Cardinal Slipyi also longed to fulfill his dream a full-fledged Ukrainian Catholic University. Toward that end, they opened the re-named Lviv Theological Academy in 1994 which now provides the academic program for the seminarians. In November 1998, the revived Academy received accreditation from Rome to grant the ecclesiastical Bachelor’s of Theology. In June 2000, ground was broken for a new Theological Center in the city of Lviv, which will combine the seminary residence and the University’s theological faculty.