Editors’ note: Metropolitan Borys Gudziak of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia has made more than 10 pastoral trips to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on 24 February 2022, offering pastoral care and solidarity to a suffering people. In January, the United Nations reported the war had killed more than 12,300 civilians and created 4 million internally displaced persons and 6.8 million refugees, making it the biggest war Europe has seen since World War II. As the fourth year of the war begins, the archbishop shares experiences he had last autumn among the communities along the front in eastern and southern Ukraine. Last June, Archbishop Gudziak received CNEWA’s Faith & Culture Award for his outstanding commitment to promoting and preserving the dignity of the human person.

Boarding a train bound for Odesa, southern Ukraine, I realized I was heading into a war zone. Sometimes the front lines were only 20 miles away — palpably close.

When I arrived, the Odesa port, a key grain hub feeding millions in Africa and the Middle East, was visibly scarred. The great Potemkin Stairs, a renowned Odesan landmark, were deserted. Before the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the front stood on what are now the scored fields of the Mykolaiv region.

The war was painfully raw at the military cemetery on the southern outskirts of Zaporizhzhia. It stared at us vacantly through the windows blown out by daily artillery and rocket fire in the cities, towns and villages stretched along the approximately 600-mile active front, ever present in the missile-ravaged homes from Kryvyi Rih to Kharkiv. It screeched in countless air raid sirens.

On our last night in Kharkiv, a guided bomb landed very close to my team’s residence and exploded. I was so consumed and exhausted by all these impressions that, unlike my colleagues, I slept through the air raid alerts four nights in a row.

War helps us focus on what is most important. When confronted with life and death — the fundamental human question — everything frivolous and superficial fades away. When we are forced to look each other in the eyes, we begin to see the other as a person.

The war is immediate. It is seen in the eyes of Serhiy Gaidarzhy, a young man who lost his wife and 4-month-old son in a direct missile strike last spring. That night, he and his 3-year-old daughter were sleeping in another room of the apartment they rented in Odesa.

The war is direct. It is experienced in the painful memories of Oleh Pylypenko, a local administration head in the Mykolaiv region, who spent nearly three months in Russian captivity, where he was beaten, tortured and electrocuted. It weighs on the worries of Ludmyla Holub, head of a farming community in Mykolaiv, whose cooperative was nearly destroyed. It is evident in the intense expressions of a Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest in Zaporizhzhia, whose two sons joined the military to protect their land, and in the resolve of the Caritas Zaporizhzhia team, many of whom are internally displaced and have lost their homes — more than once — as Russian troops repeatedly advanced. 

The war is a catalyst. It is behind the dedication of the tiny Ukrainian Greek Catholic community in Lozova, near Kharkiv, whose members pray in a small one-story house and has dedicated an entire room for volunteers to weave camouflage installations.

The war’s devastation is visible in the tears of a young woman we met at the military cemetery near Zaporizhzhia, who had been engaged to a 23-year-old man who fell in battle the previous year. Yet her pain was not self-centered, and she asked us to bless the fresh grave of another soldier, whom she had seen buried without a priest.

The war is close to these people. And my primary mission was to be close to them as well. I wanted to thank them for their resilience, express my respect and assure them of our solidarity. I wanted to tell them we pray every day for the soldiers and the refugees, the wounded, the deceased and all innocent victims. We pray for the conversion of the genocidal aggressors, the alleviation of pain and healing. I hoped to assure the valiant that there are millions of Americans flying the blue-and-yellow flag outside their homes, making donations, and lifting up prayers and petitions for Ukraine. I wanted to assure them Catholics stand firmly with Ukrainians, they understand where truth and falsehood are found, know the difference between good and evil, and honor the valor of those who risk their lives to defend this difference.

People were grateful for such help and support, but what they appreciated more was our presence. We heard this from a young Roman Catholic priest in Zaporizhzhia and from the director of a printing house in Kharkiv struck by a rocket on 23 May 2024, killing seven employees and injuring three times as many. We heard this also from the rector of Kharkiv University, which, due first to COVID-19 and then to the invasion, has not functioned normally for almost four years. All of them told us: “Thank you for being here! We feel we are not abandoned!”

Paradoxical as it sounds, I traveled to eastern and southern Ukraine to learn about faith and joy. What is happening there is sacred, it is sacramental. The defenders of human dignity are helping the world, helping all of us, to understand fully the meaning of life and death, to believe in eternity, to break free from the worship of comfort, and to open our minds and hearts to profound truths. The tragedy, suffering and evil of war are also an occasion for spiritual awareness and growth.

This war has also given me a better understanding of my parents. My mother’s older sister died in 1945 in the anti-Soviet resistance of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. My father, as a teenager, fled the country, leaving behind his parents, who had buried eight children and later saw their ninth deported to Siberia. As refugees, my mother and father witnessed atrocities, witnessed the Holocaust. My aunt, who later lived in Queens, New York, helped to carry water so families could wash and identify the bodies of those tortured in a Soviet prison in Zolochiv. Growing up, my parents told me all these stories, but I had not fully grasped them. Raised in the comfort of suburban America in the ’60s and ’70s, my imagination could not register such barbarity. But now, having seen war so closely, having looked into the eyes of those who lost their homes and their loved ones, I feel I understand better.

And I know there is hope.

My parents’ generation survived. They studied, started families, raised children and nurtured community life. Yes, they were marked by trauma, which was at times evident in addiction, conflict or aggression. But, with the grace of God and the community of the church, their lives bore much fruit. Faith and community provided fortitude. Commonality of purpose served as a foundation for resilience.

Those same virtues are what I saw in Ukraine, close to the war. I saw a great love for life. The people near the front want to live and want to prevail. They cannot afford to lose, to live under occupation or to have their hope taken away. I saw the authenticity of human experience and the power of community. And I hope to share something of this power here in the United States, where we can sometimes lose hope as we see our communities decline in the face of many challenges.

Arriving in Odesa on 4 September, I realized the proximity of war is not merely geographical. While the train was taking me closer to the war zone, a Russian hypersonic missile hit an apartment building in Lviv, a city thought to be safe. The attack affected several families I know. A second-year student at Ukrainian Catholic University, Daryna Bazylevych, 18, along with her sisters, Yaryna, 21, and Emilia, 7, and their mother, Yevhenia, 43, were killed while sheltering in the staircase of the building. Their father, Yaroslav, alone survived. For him, in Lviv, the war is as immediate as it is for Serhiy in Odesa.

The war is close. And this means we must be closer.

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