He was born into a fairly well to-do and political active peasant family in the village of Dobromirka in Zbarazh powiat (county), then part of Galicia, in Austria-Hungary in 1877.

He received his primary education in his native village and the county town, and later studied at the classical gymnasium in Ternopil, where he graduated in 1897 with honors.

He then worked as a tutor for the children of Prince Leo Sapieha in Bilche Zolote, and then did a year of military service, taking officer's training in Vienna.

In 1909 he wrote a doctoral dissertation on Byzantine religious history 1909 entitled Діссертация докторска: Дисциплїна Грецкої Церкви в сьвітлі полєміки за часів Фотия, but was not able to defend it due to ill health and later his departure for Canada.

During this time he was charged with the care of Ukrainian immigrants in Austria, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada and Bosnia by Metropolitan Andriy.

He arrived in Winnipeg in December of 1912 and immediately embarked on a tour of the Ukrainian block settlements of Western Canadian by train, horse, and foot in difficult winter conditions, returning in March 1913.

[3] In Canada he helped to establish residences for Ukrainian youth, organize parishes, build churches and schools, and found the seminaries named for Andriy Sheptytsky in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba and Taras Shevchenko in Edmonton, Alberta.

Following the war he continued his organizational work despite his eparchy's precarious finances: he help found the Ukrainian National Council in Winnipeg in 1919, hosted a sobor (synod) in Yorkton in 1924.

He continued until 1927, when he left for a visit to Rome and while there asked to be transferred back to Galicia, exhausted from his fifteen years at the head of the Canadian church.

[8] In 1928, he returned to now Polish-controlled Galicia and became vicar general of the Metropolitan Curia in L'viv and worked on the restoration of the Shrine of the Virgin in Zarvanytsia.

At the end of World War II, Galicia was occupied by the Soviet Union, and Budka opposed the communist-mandated separation of the Ukrainian Catholic Church from Rome, and for this he was imprisoned on April 11, 1945, along with other bishops.