Twentieth Anniversary of the Passing of Saint John Paul II

April begins with anniversaries of people who have passed from this life into the infinite embrace of the Mystery of God - people who played fundamental roles in the formation and sustenance of my own life's journey.

Twenty years ago, April 2, 2005, Pope Saint John Paul II came to the end and the fulfillment of his singular vocation as a global witness to Jesus Christ: the Living One who calls each person to eternal life. John Paul was the Bishop of Rome, the Successor of Saint Peter, and a great teacher for more than a quarter of a century. His papacy began when I was 15 years old and ended when I was 42. His witness of preaching the Gospel — the Word made flesh who reveals God's love and the full truth of what it means to be human — reached me personally as an encounter with Jesus that was decisive for my life as a young person. My whole generation of Catholic Christians shared in this experience and found the strength and contours of our Christian vocation through the light of the Holy Spirit that shined through John Paul II at the dawn of the third millennium.

Now we are growing older and the world shakes once again with the explosions of war and great winds of change that carry us we-know-not-where. But we have his enduring friendship in the Communion of Saints, from which Saint John Paul II reminds us: "Be not afraid."

John Paul had prepared and released the written text of his final Angelus message, which was read at noon on Sunday, April 3, the day after his death, Divine Mercy Sunday. Here is a section of those words:

"As a gift to humanity, which sometimes seems bewildered and overwhelmed by the power of evil, selfishness and fear, the Risen Lord offers his love that pardons, reconciles and reopens hearts to love. It is a love that converts hearts and gives peace. How much the world needs to understand and accept Divine Mercy!

"Lord, who reveal the Father's love by your death and Resurrection, we believe in you and confidently repeat to you today: Jesus, I trust in you, have mercy upon us and upon the whole world."

The Current Regime “Trumps” JJ’s Mental Health

Woof! It’s exhausting! Maybe writing about it will help.

In the Spring of the year 2025, JJ finds himself in a rare and peculiar situation: I am 62 years old; a born U.S. citizen who is a third generation descendant from Italian immigrants; a person who grew up in the 1970s in the Northeast where I came to know people with vastly diverse opinions and to appreciate them as persons (and sometimes friends) even if we had ardent disagreements about important issues. I am a man of advanced education and wide connections that include Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans (some of whom live here on various kinds of work visas, and who have serious concerns about their future in this country). I myself am a former expat, living in Italy 1993-1994 and gaining much perspective on my own homeland as seen by others. I am a husband, father, and grandfather who cares about the future of my country and the world, who hopes his grandchildren can grow up in a society that is both decent and generous.

I am also a physically and mentally disabled person for the past 17 years who has sometimes lived “on the edge” of a frightening health condition, and a beneficiary during that time of Social Security Disability and Medicare for myself and my five children as they were growing up. I am a teacher by profession married for nearly 30 years to another teacher – my dear wife who is singularly dedicated, who works harder and cares more deeply for her students than anyone realizes. Between the two of us, we have barely managed to scrounge up enough income to run our idiosyncratic, funny, book-cluttered, small and (in the old days) crowded but cozy and — on the whole — happy home. I don’t mean to sound irresponsible or pietistic when I say, “We trust in God” to be provided with and sustained by what matters most for our common life. And God has been good and generous to us. 

Both of us regard education as a vocation, a calling to serve others by sharing the gifts we have been given (which means that I continue my involvement in this service in whatever ways I can within the limitations of my condition). Some of you have read my 2010 book Never Give Up, or you've read at least part of my ongoing (over a decade) monthly column in Magnificat on conversion stories. It costs me more energy than you can imagine to write that two-page column every month. I also have ongoing “study-projects” on China and East Asia, on the significance of technological advances in media, and on the life and work of Luigi Giussani.

Above all, I am a follower of Jesus Christ in His Catholic Church. I belong to Jesus, the Redeemer of all human beings and all creation, the One who answers my cry from the depths of what I often feel to be the disaster of my own life, my abysmal failure in everything, and most importantly my sins. I am a sinner. I try to listen to the voice of Jesus through the living reality of His Church, which makes it possible to encounter Him in today’s world and in my own daily life. I travel through this life together with a particular friendship that I have been entrusted to by Christ and that lives fully from within the Church: from Word and Sacrament and a confident following of the teaching and pastoral guidance of the Pope and the bishops in communion with him. "Following" is not an abdication of my own reason and freedom. Quite the contrary, for here I find Jesus speaking to our reason enlightened by faith, stirring up the gifts of the Holy Spirit who gives us a new way of seeing reality; Jesus making gentle but convincing appeals to our freedom. Those who are called to be “shepherds” in the Church have their flaws (sometimes terrible flaws), but they pass on something greater than themselves – they witness to the One who was crucified and is risen, to the tradition that sustains His saving presence through history and demonstrates that He is the answer to our times as well. Everyone is seeking Him (whether they know it or not). We seek Him in our silence, our words, and our actions. Concern for the common good of our globally interconnected world – especially for the poor and those who suffer injustices and oppression – is for us a work of Christian love (agape, caritas), a “work of mercy.”

Belonging to Jesus Christ in the Church has sustained in me a fascination for the whole scope of human existence, a rich intellectual life focused on reality as well as a particular tenderness toward the struggles and problems of human persons. I still restlessly search for the human face in all its expressions, because these are the faces of my brothers and sisters, the face of Jesus. This is the deep-down joy of my sometimes difficult life — a joy deeper than the stormy winds of illness and pain, or of psychological and emotional states that afflict me.

That being said, I am a bit depressed these days. I find myself disoriented by the wildness that has been unleashed in my native country. Of course, I know that as Christians we are “strangers and sojourners” in this world (see 1 Peter 2:11), who seek our ultimate fulfillment beyond this present life, though not “disconnected” from the significance of the goodness we encounter and engage on earth. I do “love my country” (perhaps more than I realized), but how do I “fit in” to its peculiar and presently bizarre drama? What am I called to offer, here and now? How can I say anything (or even remain silent) without being misunderstood?

The fact that I am burdened with a sense of “patriotic disenfranchisement” is not a new problem. I have grown up in a world that is undergoing earthquakes of change. Meanwhile, rich nations (including my own) endeavor as never before to organize and govern themselves as if God does not exist, as if the mystery of being created persons called by the Infinite One to a transcendent destiny is irrelevant to our common life. Even if we make loud references to God (or to “Jesus”) in our politics, we are speaking largely empty words about a “God” whom we have “tamed” to the exigencies of our own agenda. We can easily place this “God,” this “Jesus” that we have reinvented in our own minds, on the edges of the altars we have raised up to our other “gods” — money, power, self-assertion, “success,” self-indulgence, envy. A God who demands justice is irrelevant to our criteria for “justice,” which means that the God who is merciful — who loves us, forgives us, saves us — has also been exiled from our public life and our understanding of the foundations of human dignity.

The result is that we find ourselves strangers to one another, searching desperately for our own “identities” without foundation, without guidance. No wonder we fail to hear the cries of the poor. When we marginalize God, we marginalize the poor, we ignore the most vulnerable among us. I agree with Mother Teresa who said [here I paraphrase], more than thirty years ago, “If we kill children in the wombs of their mothers, what is to stop me from killing you, or you from killing me.” Nevertheless, political parties that aspire to champion the “rights of the poor” refuse to attend to the poorest of the poor. On the contrary, they positively trample upon the human dignity of the mother and the unborn child in her womb — two persons who both have the need and the right to be loved and supported by those around them, by their families and communities and if necessary with the assistance of public resources. I am bewildered by these would-be idealists who try to cover up prenatal homicide by calling it a “fundamental human right”! How can I trust anything these parties say?

Many other problems in my own country are similarly steeped in a blind and deadly ignorance. I grew up in a time when “peace” was secured by the recognition of a common enemy (the Communist world) that was more deeply and evidently sunk in human degradation, but that in many ways was a strange mirror image of the so-called “free world,” enshrining in its ideology and brutally enacting political violence that we restrained among ourselves more by hypocrisy than rooted conviction. There was “peace” among the great powers while both sides waged proxy wars among the poorer nations, but above all because both sides built stockpiles of obscene nuclear weapons and mutually threatened to bomb the human race into extinction as a response to a first strike by the other. We were spared this total catastrophe by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but the opportunity for a more genuine form of peace quickly became obscured by the ensuing aimless fragmentation that gave rise to new sources of violence. We learned nothing of our need for the wisdom of God and plunged more deeply into our own self-obsession — into new “extensions” of the power of our own narcissism by the amplification of media technology, into delusions of satisfaction that exhausted the human senses and imprisoned the human heart, into sexual chaos, the cheapening of life, greater exploitation of the natural world, ignorance of any kind of meaningful humanism, and — of course — greater deafness to the cries of the poor.

And we still stand under the horrific shadow of nuclear weapons, perhaps not to danger of extinction but still subject to the possibility of a war that might bring “fire and fury like the world has never known” (as the American President threatened in 1945 and accurately predicted of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — it is disconcerting to hear such threats repeated in more recent days).

I could reflect also on much that is good in human affairs, and I always prefer to seek out the good. Even if we have forgotten God, the fact remains that God has not forgotten us. The Mystery of God remains at work among us in unfathomable ways, bringing good out of evil, drawing us with love and mercy.

But right now, I’m depressed, and I might as well put my depression to good use. In these days, my depression is being “triggered” by events that should be called out, by further incoherence in our public life, by things that — notwithstanding my own complex neuropathological profile — are genuine sources of confusion and apprehension that cannot be ignored.

It’s not surprising that I find myself increasingly disoriented and disturbed by the recent actions of our new government. The problem in the United States today is not simply that our leadership is being aggressive and radical in its actions; it is also the way in which the leadership dictates forceful measures without any interest in building a reasonable level of credibility or respect for the “authority” it claims. On the contrary, it disregards the law and its courts, tramples on longstanding government precedents, threatens its opponents, and – in the name of ridding us of “terrorists” – unleashes an extrajudicial police force to arrest people without charges, without access to lawyers, without trial, without any accountability, and sends these people to a prison of cruel and unusual punishment run by a for-profit private company in El Salvador.

There is a lot of evidence — to say the least — that innocent people who came from Venezuela to the USA through a legal path of asylum-seeking established by the previous administration (and reneged on by the current regime) have been “disappeared.” We don’t know who they are, or how many they are, or what crimes the guilty may have committed. No doubt there are also (mostly) violent criminals among this deported group. There are many more violent criminals who are U.S. citizens. Violent crime is an awful and ever-expanding problem in our land. Scapegoating undocumented immigrants and hauling them off to lawless prison colonies in other countries is just compounding crime with more crime. When we respond to violence with violence, society only becomes more destructive. When respect for the dignity of the human person vanishes, no one can live in peace. “Safety” is an illusion when we allow violence to become the principle of our government, when we decide that some human persons among us ought to be stripped of their most basic human rights and treated like garbage, when we no longer care if the innocent suffer with the guilty and no one has recourse to any means of rectifying injustice.

Meanwhile, our current national leadership has discarded even the pretense of civility, descending into verbal warfare as a substitute for reasonable explanation. This regime openly insults neighboring nations and threatens to absorb them against their will. It seems intent on losing the trust of former allies and isolating our country from everyone except dictatorships and rogue states. Not surprisingly, the head of our current leadership — while demanding more power — never acknowledges any mistakes, never apologizes, rarely even attempts to explain the regime’s behavior in a reasonable way, and never takes responsibility for the negative consequences of anything that is done.

I cannot see any long-term constructive good coming from this illegal, offensive, dangerous, and dishonorable behavior coming out of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government. But what does the "other party" have to offer? They pretend greater coherence and refinement of speech. They talk about “human rights,” but they have dug in their heels to insist upon the public promotion of “freedom” as individualistic anarchy that extends to the point of affirming a “right” to kill defenseless human persons. 

I am not the only U.S. citizen who sees the current “duopoly” as an intractable problem. I have already given a detailed account of my own political decisions elsewhere [see HERE]. To be presented with a choice between “two evils” hardly constitutes a meaningful participation in the political process. In my opinion, we need different kinds of elections, but that is not the only thing — or even the most important thing — we need in politics today, much less in life.

Rather, I have a different kind of hope, which pertains to eternal life but also sheds light on this current life in ways that can be “sketched out.” I don’t have ready solutions to specific problems, but I see some part of the outline of a more human world that might emerge insofar as we open ourselves to the cultivation of wisdom and a new kind of loving attention to the Source of all wisdom. But I will save my reflections on that theme for another post.

The “Greatness” of Pope Francis

Pope Francis, March 26, 2025. I’m so grateful that he is still with us, that his ministry will continue among us for as long as God wills. This quotation is from the text he published for what would have been yesterday’s “Wednesday General Audience.” Though he is not yet ready to resume public appearances, he continues to exhort us, console us, and stir up hope within us.

Pope Francis—with his pastoral style, his extraordinary gestures, and his fidelity to the Holy Spirit’s wisdom in guiding the continuing reform of the Church—has indeed become another of the “Great Popes” of our time. He stands with Benedict XVI, Saint John Paul II, Blessed John Paul I, Saint Paul VI, and Saint John XXIII as vivid witnesses to the Gospel, each in his own distinctive way. Certainly, each of them can be “criticized” for “this and that,” for particular moments in which they fell short (although rare is the true and faithful “critic,” who has the requisite scope of knowledge, humility, and wisdom to set forth constructive and collaborative insights in this regard, with the appropriate discretion, for the good of the Church and the world). In contrast to their unsurprising human inadequacies, look at the miracle of their diverse-but-unified shining witness to the truth and love of Jesus Christ! The Popes of my lifetime have been a common beacon of light in this world of darkness, anxiety, suspicion, confusion, and falsehood—this world of unprecedented human power that seems to make us dizzy, reckless, and violent when it should be directed to serve the dignity of the image of God in every human person.

They have been prophets of Christ’s saving love in a world that now approaches unprecedented chaos. Pope Francis continues this prophetic mission in the deepening darkness of our present time, reminding us to adhere to Jesus whose love has “overcome the world” and who is therefore—in every moment—the hope of the world, and especially of those who have been cast aside, those who are lost or overwhelmed by the darkness, those who have been oppressed, dehumanized, forgotten, treated like garbage. Jesus “finds” us, heals us, renews us, leads us on our journey to our ultimate fulfillment in the Triune God, and impels us to reflect His glory even in this world, in works of mercy that seek to build up a culture of life, a civilization of love, a revolution of tenderness.

The Annunciation

Happy Solemnity of the Annunciation! (Coptic Ethiopian icon.) 

“Behold the handmaid of the Lord. / Be it done unto me according to your word. / And the Word was made flesh…” (Angelus).

Saint Oscar Romero: A Model Bishop For Our Time

Today is the feast of Saint Oscar Romero, Archbishop and Martyr. He was assassinated by El Salvador’s “Death Squads” while saying Mass at the altar, forty-five years ago on this day, March 24, 1980. 

Romero publicly denounced the sins of oligarchs and politicians who oppressed the poor, and called on them to repent and to “stop the repression.” May he inspire bishops today to imitate his humility, his courage, and his love for the God who gives ineradicable dignity to EVERY human person. 

Saint Oscar Romero, pray for us, pray that Jesus will enlarge our hearts. Protect us from following those who serve false prophets and idolators of money.

Pope Francis Released From Hospital

Pope Francis has been released from the hospital. He has sufficiently recovered from a difficult battle with double pneumonia. He made a brief public appearance for the Sunday  Angelus. Further therapy, rest, and recuperation will continue at his residence at Casa Santa Marta.

Thanks be to God!

During his illness, the Pope has been communicating through writing, and has expressed his gratitude for our prayers and his offering of his suffering in solidarity with the sick throughout the world.

I found consolation in his accompaniment, and encouragement to live and offer my own strange and debilitating illnesses in union with Jesus, in the Communion of the Church. Suffering is not "worthless." In Christ and through His grace, it can become a way of loving.

Lord have mercy on this poor world, in the gathering darkness, the violence and inhumanity, and in all the incomprehensible sorrows that so many endure.

The Many Moods of March 2025

Happy First Day of Spring! 

Well, for the Northern Hemisphere, at least. For my Aussie and Argentine friends (and all others in temperate zones south of the equator) it's the first day of Autumn.

March of 2025 has given us a little bit of everything in weather, with lots of sudden changes. Now, finally, we are seeing buds and tulips and blooming forsythias. Here are my impressions in digital art of the world outdoors in recent weeks: 

Saint Joseph’s Day 2025

Saint Joseph is a unique companion in the Great Friendship that is the Church. We have images and statues of Saint Joseph (as we do of Jesus, Mary, and all the saints) not out of idolatry or superstition, but to help us to remember that the Church is a communion of persons. Saint Joseph is a real person. The saints are real persons in the Church, whose lives have been definitively fulfilled in God, who dwell with Christ in Glory, but who are also our brothers and sisters who love us.

Joseph is a person who fulfilled a singular mission during his earthly life, and he has a correspondingly unique presence, vitality, and accessibility within the communion of saints. Not only do we learn from his example, we can rely on him as the most faithful and steadfast of friends. Saint Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, pray for us!

I Don’t “Make Myself”

I know that I don’t “make myself.” 

I don’t cause my own existence. I am radically given-to-myself and sustained-in-myself at every moment by an “Other” who is beyond my understanding — who is “Mystery” — but who is “present” and whom I want to address as a “You.” The Mystery is “You-who-make-me.” The Source and the Reality of which I am a “sign.” The One who transcends the whole universe and at the same time — as Augustine says — is “nearer to me than I am to myself.” 

At the depths of myself there is an Other. The desire for the Infinite, the voice of conscience, the sense of gratitude, the energy of hope. I don’t “make” the foundations of my own human experience. I am “given to myself.” I am a “created person.”

Happy Birthday Christina Grimmie! (2025)

Today would have been Christina Grimmie’s 31st Birthday.💚🎶 

We remember with gratitude this astonishing young woman, her joy, her great humanity, and the wonderful gift of her voice.⭐️

Serve the Lord; Don't Worship Earthly Power

We must worship God and trust in Him, rather than selling our souls in order to "win" the struggle for political power.

Pictures Rather Than Words

I can't find the words for these days. So, instead, I work on pictures.

"Share Your Bread With The Hungry..."

Prayer, Fasting, Justice, Mercy. 

The mercy of God will enable us to be merciful to one another.

Ukraine: “Our Heart Must Burn With Love and Compassion”

Once again I wish to reference this courageous and prophetic Archbishop, his Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek (Byzantine) Catholic Church. He comments in this sermon about recent days, including “that Frightful Friday” (when the U.S. betrayed Ukraine, publicly humiliated its leader, and placed its trust in “the Russian ungodly aggressor”). As Archbishop Shevchuk has made clear elsewhere, this is a conflict between truth and LIES. Still, he places his hope in the love of Christ, reminding everyone that “regardless of all human agreements—successful or unsuccessful—the Lord has His plan of rescue and salvation of Ukraine.”

Our Lenten Journey Begins

“O God, be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13).

Ukrainian Bishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk on War, Peace, Hope

I am reproducing below, for educational purposes, the text of a recent lecture given at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC on February 19, 2025 by His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, Primate of the Ukrainian Greek (Byzantine) Catholic Church—an Eastern Christian Church that is in full communion with the Pope of Rome. 

This is a Catholic Church that has suffered persecution for hundreds of years because of its fully Byzantine identity (“sui iurus”) combined with its unshakeable fidelity to the Pope according to the authority given to him by Christ as the Successor of Saint Peter. Because of its loyalty to the Pope, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was violently suppressed repeatedly by Imperial Muscovite Russia after its expansionist annexation of Ukrainian lands, and by the Soviet Union—especially by Stalin, who liquidated its public existence by a fake “synod” that supposedly “reunited it” with the State-controlled Russian Orthodox Church in 1946. In spite of this total repression by Stalin and the (Muscovite) Soviet Communist leaders who came after him, millions of Ukrainian Catholics remained faithful to communion with Rome and the Universal Church. Many suffered martyrdom, or gave witness to their Catholic adherence by enduring decades of imprisonment, slave labor, and humiliation in the infamous GULAG system. Still, Ukrainian Catholics kept alive an “underground Church” in their homeland (until the fall of the Soviet Union) while growing openly among large expatriate communities in many places throughout the world, including North and South America. 

I grew up in the 1970s in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania within walking distance of the beautiful Ukrainian cathedral of the Eparchy of Pittsburgh (an “eparchy” corresponds more or less to what we call a “diocese” in the Latin rite). The Cathedral was a focal point for my introduction to the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom and the Eastern traditions which I still cherish to this day as a Latin-rite Catholic who has always longed to “breathe with both lungs” (as Saint John Paul II termed it) of Christ’s Mystical Body. I also came to know Ukrainian Catholics who were not only passionate about their faith, but also dedicated to preserving their Ukrainian national identity and culture, which included speaking Ukrainian at home among their families (this did not prevent them from being proficient in English and being integrated and constructive citizens of the countries that gave them refuge). 

Indeed, I know well that Ukrainians do not consider themselves “Russians” (in the sense used by Muscovite Imperialism, Stalinist totalitarianism, or contemporary proponents of “New Russia” or “Russian World” ideologies). Even in the communist decades when Ukraine regarded itself as a “captive nation,” their desire was not only national freedom, but also to be recognized as Europeans. Today, Ukrainians know that Vladimir Putin’s neo-Stalinist ambitions include cutting their people off from the West, eliminating their country’s identity and distinctive history, and destroying the Ukrainian language itself, as a common tongue and in its rich literary tradition.

Today’s Ukrainian Catholic Primate Sviatoslav lives and ministers among his people in Kyiv, knowing that a Russian victory will cost him his life, and now—more particularly—knowing that if Donald Trump “makes peace” by effectively delivering Ukraine into the hands of Vladimir Putin, Sviatoslav will be “disappeared” as his predecessors were during the Soviet era. The current Ukrainian Primate is a pastoral man, a man of prayer, a humble man. He is not a political leader, but as a bishop he knows that he must discern and obey God’s will for his people and denounce the lies and propaganda of those who set themselves against the truth.

Archbishop Sviatoslav reminds me of another recent heroic archbishop who, under very different particular circumstances, found that his vocation to be a Shepherd to his people—to lead them to grow in fidelity to Christ and the Church with the whole of their humanity—required him to distinguish clearly truth and goodness against lies and deception, and to speak truth to power. He too preached the concrete demands of social justice within the context of the hope of the resurrection and eternal life. When on March 24, 1980 the blood of the great Archbishop and Martyr Saint Oscar Romero was shed on his beloved land of El Salvador, the violence did not stop. It intensified for over a decade, and even today this little Central American country has serious problems. But Romero’s life and his martyrdom remain as a sign of hope—precisely the hope which Sviatoslav preaches in this talk, the hope that he lives together with his people in Kyiv amidst the daily bombs that Putin rains down upon them, the hope that he sees awakening in the hearts of the Ukrainian people that promises eternal life and works like leaven deep in the world, opening up possibilities for a true peace and a more just and fraternal society.

I have said more than enough. Here is the speech of His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, Archbishop and Primate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church:

————————————————————————-

February is a month when Ukraine becomes a global headline—whether due to conflicting statements from the U.S. administration and international capitals in the last hours, the full-scale Russian invasion three years ago, or the brutal killing of a hundred peaceful protesters in the heart of Kyiv eleven years past.

But today, I invite us to look beyond the headlines—beyond peace deals and bargaining, beyond minerals and economy, beyond politics and statements, beyond territorial losses and gains. In our discussion I would like to focus on people. I am not a politician or a civic leader—I am a pastor, entrusted with the care, prayer, and guidance of my people.

People possessing God-given dignity who suffer.

Children of God who desire peace.

People of peace who demand justice.

In 2014 on this very date of February 18, the then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych used brutal force — riot police and snipers — against peaceful protesters in Kyiv. For three months, these demonstrators had been protesting his refusal to sign an agreement that would initiate Ukraine’s process of joining the European Union.

This movement became known as the Revolution of Dignity. The call to defend dignity united people from all walks of life: university students and industrial workers, poets and janitors, Ukrainian and Russian speakers, believers and agnostics. Dignity and solidarity became their common language, the very air they breathed. And these people—diverse in background, but united in purpose—collectively and individually decided that it was worth risking their lives to defend human dignity. Sadly, more than a hundred of them were mercilessly executed by snipers on February 18th and 20th.

Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity was a collective realization that without respect for human life, freedom, and dignity, a just society cannot exist. Our people understood that without reverence for human life, no society can be truly free.

Russia deemed Ukraine’s stand for dignity unacceptable and began a stealth invasion to undermine the people’s struggle for dignity and independence.

The war now lasting 11 years is the same ongoing battle. This is the price the people pay for the desire to live in freedom and dignity.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “the dignity of the human person is rooted in his or her creation in the image and likeness of God.” The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church adds that “the dignity of the human person is the foundation of the moral and social order.” The Church teaches that this dignity is inherent and inalienable.

Our dignity isn’t a wish, a mere desire or ambition. It is bestowed by God, in whom we believe, who created us with dignity and freedom in His image and likeness.

This is the crux of the battle for Ukraine. A war for the dignity of people, as we now see, has become a struggle for the people’s very existence.

Those who doubt this need only listen to the stories of those released from Russian captivity, such as our two Redemptorist priests from now occupied Berdyansk, who endured 18 months in a Russian prison. They tell about beatings and tortures, humiliation and deprivations, about human dignity being shattered and trampled. We remember the mass graves in Bucha and Izyum. We remember attacks on the maternity hospital in Mariupol in spring 2022 and children hospital in Kyiv in summer 2024. Bombing apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and shopping centers, Russia continues to kill innocent civilians. That’s why the Ukrainian defense forces continue to fight. It is not just a question of territory. We cannot abandon or surrender our people.

Allow me to share with you my insights and experiences of a country that has been at war since 2014, and, especially now, as we are within a few days of marking three years since the horrible full-scale invasion. I will begin with a brief overview of the history behind this war and the notion of a “Russian World” or Russkiy Mir, what is considered as just peace, and I will finish on the hope that the Lord brings. During the discussion I hope to describe the ministry of our Church with concrete examples.

Causes of the war

To forge a just peace, we must understand the root causes of this horrible aggression. To believe that the cause is NATO expansion or Russia’s security concerns is to repeat the Russian narrative and propaganda. NATO did not exist when Russia invaded Ukraine in the 17th and 18th centuries or at the beginning of the 20th century. The international order was not an issue in the 1930s when the Soviet Union killed Ukrainian poets, novelists and other representatives of the so-called Executed Renaissance. Ukraine was not a threat to Russian culture when the 1932–33 Holodomor was deliberately engineered, killing at least four million people through an artificially engineered famine. Ukrainian Catholic bishops, priests, monks, nuns, and faithful persecuted and arrested during the liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the 1940s were not a threat to the Church in Russia. They simply wanted to practice their faith. Yet, this fundamental right was denied to them.

This aggression as previous invasions and persecutions were motivated by a Russian imperial and eventually totalitarian mentality.

Russian twentieth century totalitarianism is rooted in the disregard for freedom and the dignity of the human person. The Catholic intellectual tradition in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas calls this “tyranny.” The letter of our synod about the war and a just peace in the context of new ideologies explains: “Totalitarian rulers seek to conquer the very soul and completely master the human personality: the subject of a totalitarian state must adore his or her tormentors. Totalitarianism thus has a pseudo-religious character. The tyrants of the twentieth century destroyed or repressed the Church because they competed with religion and wanted to replace the spiritual values of traditional religions with their own ideology.”

As we look back on the aftermath of the Second World War, we can easily see that the horrific deeds of the German Nazi totalitarianism regime met with unconditional defeat and proper moral and international juridical judgement. However, “…the second totalitarian monster, the Soviet Union with communist Russia at its core, was not only not destroyed but also appeared before the world among the victors of the war, even claiming to be the main liberator from Nazism.” The lack of a true and consequential day of reckoning calls for analysis. “A significant error of the free world after the collapse of the communist bloc was that democratic countries did not demand that post-Soviet Russia, which was recognized as the successor to the Soviet Union, condemn fully the crimes of the communist period and did not require the new Russian rulers to ensure decommunization, lustration, and purging of their state from the consequences of totalitarianism.” The lack of accountability regarding the Soviet past after the collapse of the Soviet Union has enabled modern Russian totalitarianism to take on a new life.

Yet the ideological underpinnings have changed.… “modern Russian totalitarianism… is propaganda for nihilism in its worst forms; and its goal is the moral corruption of man, his dehumanization to make him weak-willed, indifferent to moral values, a tool for crimes against humanity. It seeks to undermine faith in any moral principles and tempts its subjects with the opportunity to commit violence against others with impunity. It claims that the whole world is governed only by brutal force, deception, and self-interest. Putting forward various conspiratorial theories of a global plot against Russia, it uses them to justify any crimes committed by the Russian government against other nations. In its cult of the ruler, militarism, corporatism, open propaganda of brutal violence, and emphasis on its own national and racial superiority, the modern tyranny of Moscow has much in common with the fascism of the last century; and therefore, it is not surprising that the opposite word ‘ruscism’ (рашизм) has been coined to describe it.” This national chauvinism is clearly evident in the manner in which Ukraine and Ukrainians have been denigrated and denied by Russian authorities.

I want to remind all of us what is at stake. We must be attentive because the manner of manipulation of the media and of the very concept of truth itself is a key feature of the methodology. “The second feature of modern Russian hybrid totalitarianism is the qualitatively higher level of technical tools. […] Moscow’s ruscism effectively uses the achievements of information technology, including social media. The digital revolution helps Russian propaganda create a virtual reality that is radically different from actual reality and, what is more… Modern Russian propaganda makes use of some of the most radical movements of philosophical postmodernism from the end of the last century, which deny the existence of objective and verifiable truth and claim that there are no natural foundations of morality and law. Thus, modern Russian tyranny can be called not only hybrid but also postmodern totalitarianism.” It thrives in a cyber reality news cycle that feeds people their favorite stories reinforcing only one point of view. My dear brothers and sisters, I lived in Soviet Ukraine, I was a member of the largest underground Catholic Church. I am a first-hand witness to the logical end of this propaganda. This propaganda twists reality.

Russian World ideology

The “Russian world” refers the concept of Russia as a unique civilization that has been developed in lands that are or were part of a Russian Empire—tsarist or Soviet—as well as some border lands, in which Russian hegemony should be guaranteed or reinstated. It is explicitly neo-imperial, colonial, and virulently anti-Western. It is being used as justification for the so-called “special military operation” against Ukraine. “The role of the Moscow Patriarchate in creating and promoting this ideology is now well-documented and undeniable. The Russian Orthodox Church has given the ‘Russian World’ ideology a quasi-religious spirit, by portraying Russia as the last bastion of Christianity on earth that resists the forces of evil. At the same time, the Russian Orthodox Church confers an almost sacred status on the deadliest nuclear weapons on earth.”

Since 2022 hundreds of Orthodox theologians and intellectuals have signed a joint public letter entitled “A Declaration on the ‘Russian World’ (Russkii mir) Teaching” condemning this view as heretical, and considering it to be an example of the false doctrine of ethnophyletism (the love of one’s nation superseding love for God).

The Appeal of the Christian Churches of Ukraine to Condemn the Aggressive Ideology of the “Russkiy mir” states: “Inciting hatred and waging war based on the ‘Russian World’ ideology violates Christian principles and contradicts the spiritual norms that the Church is supposed to embody. This ideology today is a challenge to the preaching of the Gospel in the modern world and destroys the credibility of Christian witness, regardless of confession.”

Longing for just peace

Everyone living in Ukraine wants to be free to live. No one wants peace more than Ukrainians do. We didn’t start this war. Ukrainians need peace, but we want a just peace. We need a peace that will allow us to live in dignity, as Ukrainians, to be free, to worship in our churches.

However, today some of the calls we here for peace are simply unrealistic: a compromise cannot be reached if one of the parties denies the very existence of the other. Up until now Russia has left Ukraine no choice but to defend itself militarily. This war is a national struggle of liberation for the Ukrainian civil nation on behalf of the right to its own existence and future, as well as the independence, freedom, and dignity of our citizens.” Ukrainians are fighting for their very existence.

“A just peace can be neither the ‘appeasement’ of the aggressor nor a so-called ‘minimal peace’ that implies recognition of the territories occupied by the aggressor. A just peace must be long-lasting and stable, with the restoration of the principles of international law. It involves not only the aggressor’s defeat and restoration Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but also includes measures aimed at restoring proper relations between Ukraine and Russia as well as healing the wounds caused by war: the disclosure of truth and identification of criminal actors, international criminal courts, reparations, political apologies and forgiveness, memorials, new constitutions, and local reconciliation forums.”

Today Ukrainians know that evil is real — we have seen its face. “The voices of the innocently murdered, ruthlessly tortured, brutally raped, and forcibly deported are calling out to the world’s conscience. Ukrainians do not question the importance of soberly weighing threats and carefully calibrating political steps. It is equally important, however, to maintain the ability to look at current events through the eyes of the victim.”

I believe wholeheartedly that this war impacts all of humanity. It impacts our ability to distinguish good and evil. “By launching a hybrid war against Ukraine, Russia has in fact challenged the entire civilized world. Russia has disrupted it so much that many people have ceased to distinguish truth and deception, and thus good and evil.

This already prevents many politicians in the civilized world from recognizing Russian troops’ atrocities in Ukraine as genocide because it would then demand their intervention.”

The Gospel is our criterion, and objective truth remains the bedrock of society. “All of this can be overcome only by a clear and distinct proclamation of the Truth of the Gospel. If modern humanity — the humanity of the ‘post-truth era’ — does not recognize objective truth, it will gradually turn into a ‘post-justice world’.

We simply ask that the rule of law be established and followed.

Ukraine desperately needs peace. As we speak, the situation remains dire. Every day and night it suffers drones and missiles attacks hitting the residential buildings and civilian infrastructure. Even when I celebrate liturgy in Kyiv we are sometimes interrupted by these attacks. On Christmas we were forced to begin the liturgy in the crypt of our cathedral that is our bomb shelter. This Christmas God has decided to be born not in a manger but in the bomb shelter of our cathedral.

The humanitarian crisis deepens by the day. In Ukraine today, 12.7 million people are identified as “in need of humanitarian assistance.” That represents 30 % of the population, every 1 in 3 people are in need. Of those 12.7 million people, 9.9 million are non-displaced people including 2.8 million displaced people. When we speak of the whole society in Ukraine, 16.3 million Ukrainians are classified as chronically affected by the war. This means that roughly 50 % or 1 out of 2 Ukrainians are chronically suffering. Of these 16.3 million, 12.6 million are not displaced while 3.6 million are which means that 1 in 10 Ukrainians are displaced.

But most painful is the fact that Ukraine is losing its people. Tens of thousands of soldiers have sacrificed their lives, over 300,000 soldiers have been injured and are in need of rehabilitation, the entire country bears the scars of this horrific war. We are mindful as well of the toll on the economy and the infrastructure. Certainly, we will rebuild bridges and houses, we will restore our economy, but every life lost is irreplaceable.

Hope

In the midst of it all, we continue to live in hope. Hope is not just wishful thinking. Hope is the certainty that God is with us, even in the darkest night. War seeks to destroy hope, but we know that Christ has already conquered evil. No force can erase the light of His resurrection. The enemy wants to sow fear and hopelessness, but we know that our strength is in God. We will not give up, for He walks with us.

Our hope comes from our trust in God and our faith that His truth will prevail. It is strengthened by solidarity with people like you — those who are willing to hear the painful stories and yet refuse to turn a blind eye.

Fr. Omelian Kovch, a priest and martyr who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp, wrote to his family: “I thank God for His goodness to me. Apart from heaven, this is the only place where I would want to be.” His words resonate deeply with me. I can testify that staying in Kyiv during this time of war is not just a duty, but a blessing—one that strengthens my faith, deepens my sense of purpose, and allows me to stand in solidarity with my people. Living in Kyiv I am witnessing how Ukraine is courageously standing against the aggressor. I observe the birth of a new culture — a culture of profound sacrifice and ultimate generosity. A culture which is deeply rooted in a Gospel even though people professing it sometimes would call themselves agnostics and do not have a clear notion of God. But their eyes and their sacrifice — military men and women, medical professionals, firefighters and first-responders — I see God who is faithful to His people. Who is

We live in hope because we have seen the miracle of being freed from the Soviet yoke and we have no desire to return. We live in hope because we have left the land of captivity and embarked on a journey to freedom and dignity. We live in hope because God guides us. We live in hope because we have people who support and pray for us. We live in hope — we are not alone. As Pope Francis encourages us, we are pilgrims of hope.

Join us in this witness to God, to life, to truth, to dignity, to freedom, and to hope!

† SVIATOSLAV