Thus, the banned Greek-Catholic Church – without any possibility of legally serving its faithful – managed to formally maintain its presence in the Orthodox Church in the form of a "clandestine" Greek-Catholic clergy. Furthermore, the Greek-Catholic Church was able to supplement, to some degree, the ranks of its priesthood through the "underground" Greek-Catholic seminaries. De-Stalinization, just like the transformation of the Greek-Catholic Church in Poland in 1956-1957, brought hope for yet another legalization of the Greek-Catholic Church in Western Ukraine. A large number of appeals regarding legalization were produced by the faithful, while a few parishes even rejected Orthodoxy. The publication in December 1957 of a resolution adopted in October of that year by the deans of the Lviv Eparchy during a conference held at the Pochaiv Monastery, quashed these aspirations. The resolution distinctly underscored the fact that the Soviet government's stance regarding the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church had not changed and that it [the church] will continue to be interpreted as an instrument in the hands of "enemies of the state." Moreover, a clear signal of the regime's hard-line attitude towards the Greek-Catholic Church, was the arrest, in the spring of 1958, of exiled Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj under the premise of illegal contacts with members of the clergy and the smuggling abroad of the metropolitan's pastoral letters and other correspondence. Following lengthy hearings in June 1959, during a closed trial in Kyiv, the metropolitan was sentenced to an additional 7 years of imprisonment. It was only as a result of ongoing discussions between Pope John XXIII, Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy between 1961 and 1963, that the metropolitan was finally released from imprisonment in late January 1963. On 4 February 1963, after secretly appointing Vasyl Velychkovsky as bishop-exarch of Lviv, Slipyj departed Moscow en route to Rome. However, improved relations between the Vatican and Moscow did not benefit the status of the Greek-Catholic Church in Ukraine – repressions against active, underground Uniate bishops and clergy commenced once again. The relative amelioration of Moscow-Vatican relations coincided with the final phase of Krushchev's "de-Stalinization" period, which nevertheless consisted of an ongoing Soviet anti-religious policy, the main target of which, since the late 1950s, was the Russian Orthodox Church. Prior to Khrushchev's ouster at the end of 1964, a large number of Orthodox churches, monasteries and seminaries were closed.