In the Cathedral of St. George in Lviv — the spiritual heart of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church — more than 500 people lingered after Divine Liturgy on 17 January for a rare chance to experience the comfort of sacred silence under the daily weight of war.

Most were teachers from across Ukraine, who had traveled to Lviv for a conference on inclusive education. The liturgy the next day highlighted outstanding educators.

In the crypt below lie the tombs of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and Major Archbishop Josyf Slipyj, both of whom promoted a vision of the church as a school of responsibility and education as a long-term strategy for a principled society.

With few Catholic schools in Ukraine, this vision has inspired members of the local church, including the Rev. Yuriy Karvatskyi, to start educational initiatives that engage the wider society. 

Father Karvatskyi, 31, cofounded the Father Yulian Dzerovych Educational Center of the Archeparchy of Lviv in 2017. In partnership with public schools, the center cultivates educational spaces where spiritual formation and professional growth converge with the aim of integrated human development.

“We saw a chance to offer more than professional training, to accompany the person as a whole, not in their functions, but as a human being,” he says.

“Education is not only about lessons. It’s a triangle of parents, teachers and children,” he continues.

Father Karvatskyi speaks of the need for leaders in Ukraine who can guide others toward solidarity, resilience and recovery. Last November, his center organized the School of National Consciousness at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv to promote identity and civic responsibility among young adults. The daylong program included a panel discussion, lectures and hands-on workshops. 

“We can have good schools and good universities, but if a teenager does not understand why they are there, even the best education will not bear fruit,” he says. “You have to show them: You can be a leader, you can change your country, you can be part of a larger process.”

The center organized a similar day on the theme, “Inclusion Without Illusions,” in partnership with Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), for educators, psychologists and resource specialists at St. George Cathedral in Lviv on 16 January. The aim was to equip those responsible for inclusive education to stand with the vulnerable and to respond to their needs.

Dmytro Sherengovskyi, 38, vice rector for outreach and social engagement at UCU, says faith-driven education must be tangible beyond the theology class in disciplines that appear purely secular.

At the university, based in Lviv, faith-based values also permeate campus life through volunteering, communal living, formation programs, and the steady presence of prayer and liturgy, he adds. 

“What matters here is not only what you study but how you then live and act,” Mr. Sherengovskyi says. “That is what forms a person.”

UCU has more than 2,500 students across 12 undergraduate and 18 master’s programs. The private university receives no state funding and is sustained through donations and tuition.

Ivanna Mohyliak, 46, who heads the student life office, says formation is woven into the university’s daily rhythm and reflected in its motto, “A University That Serves.” All 480 first-year students must take a course called “Service,” in which they “work in groups and develop ideas for social projects,” she says.

Many join initiatives that support soldiers and children. Others organize outreach activities that seek to restore community and a sense of stability for those displaced by the ongoing war with Russia.

Andriy Hlushko, a second-year theology student, lives at the Collegium, the university’s on-campus residential community, where daily life is shaped with intentionality.

Mr. Hlushko says he has learned a lot from Emmaus House, a home for adults with special needs, which is integrated into the Collegium. In those intentional daily encounters, he says, one learns to accept people unconditionally — a practice that matters for anyone who later will shape institutions, policies and communities. 

This past winter, Mr. Hlushko’s volunteer work included traveling to the front lines in the Zaporizhzhia region with UCU’s student choir to sing Christmas carols and spend time with communities under the constant strain of war.

Sister Mariia Radist Hrynyk, I.V.E., deputy master of the Collegium, coordinates a formation track that accompanies academic study. Its purpose, she says, is to help young adults grow spiritually and witness to faith in their actions and behavior.

Anzhelika Stakhovska, 37, a recent UCU graduate, joined the national office of Caritas-Spes Ukraine in 2022. Caritas-Spes is the charitable arm of the Roman Catholic community in Ukraine.

“I had a great job,” she says. “But, for me, it was work without a mission. I wanted to do something that had meaning and put my talents at the service of my country.” 

Trained as a linguist, she began as a translator, then moved into safeguarding — a field that at the time had almost no resources available in Ukrainian. With strong English skills and access to international training, she began translating global best practices into policy. Helping to build the safeguarding system from the ground up became her central achievement and the topic of her master’s thesis at UCU’s Institute of Leadership and Management. 

“This is the only program in Ukraine for nonprofit organizations,” she says. “Programs abroad do not provide our [Ukrainian] context.” 

“In a humanitarian crisis, the church must know how to help professionally.”

“Over a year and a half of study, my understanding of the sector — and of myself within it — changed completely,” she says. “We have a moral, spiritual and human obligation to provide assistance in a way that does not harm a person’s dignity.”

The safeguarding system today functions as a coherent mechanism that includes training and testing for staff and volunteers, updated policies, internal procedures and a regional network of coordinators, she says. Ms. Stakhovska also developed verified communication pathways with up-to-date contacts and services designed for reporting that functions in real time.

Caritas-Spes has grown quickly under the humanitarian demands of a war now in its fourth year. According to the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, at least 15,000 civilians have been killed and more than 40,000 injured; it says with verification difficult in areas with limited access, the true toll is likely higher.

“At the beginning of the full-scale invasion [in 2022], there were 15 people in the national office,” Ms. Stakhovska says. “Now we have more than 100.” 

Caritas-Spes operates close to the front lines in eastern Ukraine, within the dioceses of Kharkiv–Zaporizhzhia and of Odesa–Simferopol, where Catholic communities have been small historically. The organization had to work hard to overcome the perception that its mission was only to “help its own.” 

Trust, Ms. Stakhovska has learned, is built in small, consistent ways, and not all priorities and key values, such as the spiritual foundation of the work, can be captured in policy language. 

“The Catholic Church’s social teaching gave me an inner foundation,” she says. “It kept reminding me that at the center of everything must be the dignity of the human person.”

Church institutions in Ukraine — Catholic and Orthodox — are increasingly thinking long-term, not only in responding to crises, but about investing in teams and training that will sustain communities through war and rebuilding. 

These programs point to a larger shift: Across churches and confessions, compassion is being paired with competence. 

“Competence without values is dangerous, and values without competence do not always work,” says Myroslava Chekh, 41, who heads UCU’s graduate program in public management and administration.

She describes leadership as a form of service and as power reimagined as responsibility and accountability to people.

The Rev. Serhiy Dmytriyev, who works in the social service department of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, describes leadership as a disciplined practice of service that makes the church an active part of civil society. 

He is also the board chairman of Eleos Ukraine, which unites 15 regional organizations in a church-linked network that coordinates and delivers structured assistance to vulnerable people. 

A distinct focus is trauma care. In wartime, priests are often the first point of stability, and Eleos has launched long-term interconfessional training in accompaniment, crisis support and referral pathways to qualified mental health professionals. 

“We are preparing people both for the church and for the wider social environment,” he says. “In a humanitarian crisis, the church must know how to help professionally.”

Some Eleos team members study in UCU’s Institute of Leadership and Management, and the organization has drawn on the university’s expertise for strategic planning — practical cooperation that he says is one of the most honest forms of ecumenical dialogue.

Across churches and confessions, compassion is being paired with competence.

Solomia Maksymovych, director of the UCU institute, says the graduate program in nonprofit management “gives a full picture of how to build a civil-society organization, from strategy to project management” and draws both young professionals and seasoned leaders with MBAs and management experience. 

Graduate Kateryna Lutsyk, 29, now leads a support space for veterans in Khmelnytskyi, western Ukraine, where she helps soldiers and their families return to civilian life.

Upon graduating from medical college, Ms. Lutsyk enlisted as a volunteer combat medic with an air assault unit. She served from 2015 to 2021. During Russia’s military incursion into eastern Ukraine, she moved with the battalion across multiple sectors, saving more than 200 lives, until the unarmored car in which she was traveling came under sniper fire. She was left with irreversible damage: a brain hemorrhage, deafness in one ear and partial atrophy of her optic nerves. She now undergoes treatment and monitoring every six months to reduce the risk of stroke. 

Adapting to civilian life took time, she says of its challenges, but she soon moved into advocacy, promoting internationally — including at the United Nations, the World Bank and the U.S. Senate — the recognition of women in the Ukrainian military. Women who had served in combat were recorded as cooks or seamstresses, a bureaucratic erasure that also meant lost protections, pay and benefits. In 2019, Ukraine passed legislation granting women access to 63 combat roles and 450 noncombat roles previously closed to them.

Ms. Lutsyk was in Khmelnytskyi three years later, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. She says she and other veterans had been warning of a full-scale invasion, preparing, planning trainings and sketching emergency protocols. 

Within hours of the invasion, the city center filled with hundreds of people. “You could see fear in everyone’s eyes, and they wanted someone to tell them what to do,” she recalls.

Her new mission crystallized in this moment of crisis, and she decided the graduate program at UCU would give her the framework — values, tools and community — and the skills to lead a team, build a system and drive change to bring her new mission to life.

“This isn’t just formal education,” she says. “It’s about the dignity of every person.”