He was a member of the National Council of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic, and was briefly detained after Galicia became part of Poland in the aftermath of World War I.

[6] He was born as Count Roman Aleksander Maria Szeptycki in a village 40 km west/northwest of Lviv called Prylbychi, in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then a crownland of the Austrian Empire.

The Latin Catholic Bishop of Płock was Hieronim Antoni Szeptycki [pl], while his nephew Marcin was elected to the position, but did not take it.

[citation needed] Sheptytsky was baptized in the Roman rite at the parish church in Bruchnal (today Ternovytsia).

[7] His confessor was Jesuit Henry Nostitz-Jackowski [pl], who was carrying out the reform of the Greek Catholic Basilian Order in Galicia.

[7] From the 1885/6 academic year, he continued his studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, at which time he changed his nationality declaration from "Polish" to "Ruthenian".

[7] In 1899, following the death of Cardinal Sylwester Sembratowicz, Sheptytsky was nominated by Emperor Franz Joseph to fill the vacant position of Greek Catholic Bishop of Stanyslaviv[9] (now Ivano-Frankivsk), and Pope Leo XIII concurred.

[7] A year later, following the death of Julian Sas-Kuilovsky, Sheptytsky was appointed, at the age of thirty-six, Metropolitan of Halych, Archbishop of Lviv and Bishop of Kamenets-Podolsk; he was enthroned on 17 January 1901.

[7] He was active in promoting the revival and expansion of the Eastern Catholic Churches in the territory of Russian Empire, visiting incognito that country several times and secretly ordaining bishops and priests there.

In 1904, he issued a pastoral letter to Polish Greek Catholics, urging them to love their own nation and warning against harming others under the guise of patriotism.

[7] In 1908, he harshly condemned the assassination of Galician governor Andrzej Kazimierz Potocki by Ukrainian student Myroslav Sichinskyi [uk].

[7] Sheptytsky visited North America in 1910 where he met with Ukrainian Greek Catholic immigrant communities in the United States;[12] attended the twenty-first International Eucharistic Congress in Montreal; toured Ukrainian communities in Canada; and invited the Redemptorist fathers ministering in the Byzantine rite to come to Ukraine.

After the outbreak of World War I, Sheptytsky proposed eventual creation of the Ukrainian state out of the Russian territories, he also appealed believers to stay loyal to the emperor of Austria.

On July 22, 1941, in a letter to Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany's foreign minister, he protested against the annexation of Eastern Galicia to the General Government.

[7] In February 1942, he signed a letter to Adolf Hitler issued by the OUN-M opposing German policies and demanding the establishment of an independent Ukraine.

He collaborated in this work with the superiors of the Studite orders, Sister Josefa (Helena Witter) and his brother Klymentiy Sheptytsky.

[7] In August 1942, Sheptytsky sent a letter to Pius XII in which he reported on the brutal Nazi policies and unequivocally condemned the murder of Jews, and also admitted that his original assessment of the Germans' attitude toward Ukrainians was wrong.

According to historian Ronald Rychlak, "A German Foreign Office agent named 'Frederic' was sent in a tour through various Nazi-occupied and satellite countries during the war.

He wrote in his confidential report to the German Foreign Office on September 19, 1943, that Metropolitan Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky, of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, remained adamant in saying that the killing of Jews was an inadmissible act.

'Frederic' went on to comment that Sheptytsky made the same statements and used the same phrasing as the French, Belgian, and Dutch bishops, as if they were all receiving instructions from the Vatican.

[19] In addition, among the Jews who, thanks to Sheptytsky's help, survived the war were Lili Pohlmann and her mother, Adam Daniel Rotfeld (later Poland's foreign minister), two sons of the chief rabbi of Katowice (including the prominent cardiac surgeon Leon Chameides).

[7] Sheptytsky was aware of the ongoing genocide of the Polish population organized by the forces of OUN-B and the UPA since the summer of 1943.

Sheptytsky in the early years of his episcopacy expressed strong support for a celibate Eastern Catholic clergy.

[24] On 19 September 2024, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine voted to rename the city of Chervonohrad to Sheptytskyi in his honor as a part of the derussification campaign.