(OSV News) – With Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine now in its fourth year, Ukrainians are deeply wounded but nonetheless have hope, a Kansas bishop recently told OSV News.
“I don’t know how many Ukrainian people told me, ‘We believe in God, so we have hope,’” said Bishop Gerald L. Vincke of Salina, Kansas. “They kept on saying that over and over again.”
Bishop Vincke, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee on Aid to the Church in Central and Eastern Europe, traveled with a delegation to Ukraine March 12-19 to discuss pastoral needs and the impact of the USCCB's humanitarian and spiritual support.
Since 2001, the USCCB subcommittee has annually collected funds for the church in central and eastern Europe, raising more than $187.5 million as of 2023. The funds help to sustain the church as it still works to rebuild in nations scarred by decades of communism.
Accompanying Bishop Vincke on his inaugural visit to Ukraine were USCCB staff for the Central and Eastern Europe aid subcommittee, including director Jennifer Healy, grant specialist Andrew Kirkpatrick and grant administrator Mariya Lupiy. Also part of the delegation was Capuchin Franciscan Father David Songy, a licensed clinical psychologist and president emeritus of the St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Throughout their visit – centered on the city of Lviv in eastern Ukraine and the country's centrally located capital, Kyiv – Bishop Vincke and his team met with bishops, clergy and representatives of both the Ukrainian Greek and Roman Catholic churches, who described the various ways in which Russia’s war, which continues attacks launched in 2014, has impacted Ukrainians.
Among the prelates who spoke at length with the team were Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, father and head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church; Archbishop Visvaldas Kulbokas, apostolic nuncio to Ukraine; Archbishop Ihor Voznyak of the UGCC Archeparchy of Lviv; Metropolitan Archbishop Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Lviv; Bishop Yaroslav Pryriz of the UGCC Eparchy of Sambir-Drohobych; and Bishop Vitalii Kryvytskyi of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kyiv-Zhytomyr.
The itinerary included stops at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, several UGCC and Roman Catholic churches and humanitarian outreaches, and a number of physical and psychological rehabilitation centers. Those sites included Nazareth, established in 2004 by the Caritas Sambir-Drohobych Diocese Foundation as the first recovery center in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church for the treatment of chemical and behavioral addictions.
The delegation also met with Tetiana Stawnychy, president of Caritas Ukraine, who confirmed Healy's observation that the constant aerial assaults from Russian forces were a “war on nerves.”
“I couldn't sleep,” Healy told OSV News, noting that sirens sounded “at all different times, during the middle of the afternoon, at nighttime, in the morning, during liturgy.”
Although Bishop Vincke and his delegation remained unharmed during their visit, “we had just a little taste of what they (Ukrainians) have gotten used to and what they live under,” said Healy, adding that Russian forces are “trying to wear people down so that the (Ukrainian) people turn on their government and give up sooner.”
Healy said the “main aim” of the visit was “to express the solidarity of Catholics in the U.S. with Catholics in Ukraine.”
Bishop Vincke said that those the team met were “so thankful for our presence.”
He pointed to one internally displaced woman receiving food assistance from the local Catholic church.
“They had to move … because they can’t live in their homes anymore; they’re either gone or it’s too dangerous,” Bishop Vincke recalled. “She told me, ‘It’s one thing to say you care for us, but it’s another thing to be able to see you and to touch you.’”
Bishop Vincke admitted the nation’s wounds – physical, psychological and spiritual – are apparent.
“My heart aches for the people, because a drone or bomb could go off anywhere in the country, and you just never know,” he said. “My sense is that people are tired of … getting up in the middle of the night hearing the sirens, (and) also … losing so many of their family members.”
The bishop said it was “so hard” to see in each town the team visited “pictures of all the people who have died through the war in the last several years.”
One poignant example of such heartache took place while Bishop Vincke concelebrated liturgy with Major Archbishop Shevchuk.
“A little kid came up to him during Mass … a 7-year-old,” Bishop Vincke recounted. “He said, ‘Can you please pray for my father? He died yesterday in the war.’”
The effects of such trauma and grief will be felt for years, and will require sustained, long-term support, said Bishop Vincke.
“Everybody said, ‘Even if the war ended today, our people are going to need incredible spiritual and psychological support in so many ways,’” Bishop Vincke told OSV News.
Priests are increasingly being equipped to fill that need, he added.
“There are priest psychologists meeting with other priests and families, because there is so much pain there, so much pain,” said the bishop.
Amid such daunting need, many young men are heeding the call to priestly life, he added.
“We visited a couple of seminaries, and these young men are studying to be priests, knowing full well that they’re probably going to go to the front lines and minister to the soldiers and the people of God in those areas,” Bishop Vincke said. “And I was pretty amazed. … It’s brave, very brave. But they love their country.”
Priests in Ukraine are “caring for the people in a new way, providing counseling” and deepening the call to be “the hands and feet of Christ” in lifting people’s burdens, he said.
The darkness of Russia’s attacks has illuminated the transcendent power of hope in Ukraine, said Bishop Vincke.
He cited a quote from his meeting with human rights defender Myroslav Marynovych, the rector’s adviser at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and a former political prisoner from Ukraine’s years under Soviet rule.
“Myroslav told me, ‘What gives me hope is that evil does not win in the end,’” said Bishop Vincke. “They do believe God is going to provide for them in the end.”
The bishop added: “A part of me wants to stay there (in Ukraine), and just say, ‘We’re with you, we love you, we care for you.’”
(Gina Christian is a multimedia reporter for OSV News.)
