Gudziak: Ukraine’s struggle against Russia is ‘prophetic defense of God-given dignity’

Ukraine’s struggle against Russia’s war is “prophetic,” showing that “the defense of God-given dignity … happens at the price of one’s body and blood,” said Metropolitan Archbishop Borys A. Gudziak of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia.

OSV News accompanied Archbishop Gudziak on a sweeping, 1,560-mile tour of Ukraine Sept. 2-12, a cross-country pastoral visit that included several stops in the Lviv, Kyiv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro and Kharkiv regions, placing the archbishop at points within 30 miles of the front lines.

The archbishop traveled by car and rail (often passing through police and military checkpoints), as civil air traffic in Ukraine has been suspended since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion — which continues aggression launched in 2014, and which has been declared a genocide in two major human rights reports.

Air raid alerts were constant throughout the archbishop’s tour, piercing the prayers of the daily liturgies at which he presided or concelebrated in numerous parishes (both Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic) along the route. Explosions from Russian attacks and Ukrainian air defense sounded more than once throughout the journey.

Yet even with Russia’s relentless salvos of drones, bombs and guided missiles, the archbishop steadily pursued an intensive daily schedule that began with the celebration of the Eucharist, followed by back-to-back meetings with an array of clergy, religious, ministry leaders and lay faithful, as well as government officials, business executives, soldiers, academics and cultural figures.

The encounters — which served as both pastoral listening sessions and opportunities for the archbishop to offer solace to war-weary Ukrainians — were “humbling,” evoking “repeated expressions of gratitude” from participants, Archbishop Gudziak told OSV News.

“Our suffering brothers and sisters told us time and time again that sharing their suffering with us is a source of hope,” said the archbishop. “We met a lot of different people who spoke to us from the heart.”

Among the locations Archbishop Gudziak visited were several civilian structures damaged or destroyed by Russian attacks, including the port of Odesa and an Orthodox cathedral in that city that had been struck by Russia; a woman-run farming cooperative in Ukrainka, within the Mykolaiv region; and residences and business directly targeted by Russia, such as apartment buildings and a major printing press of Ukrainian-language books.

Archbishop Gudziak spent considerable time examining residential buildings in the city of Kharkiv that had been gutted by glide bombs, which Russia deploys by the hundreds against Ukraine each week. The munitions’ wings, satellite navigation and lack of heat signature render the weapons brutally precise and difficult to detect, especially when fired at close range by Russian forces on border cities such as Kharkiv.

“Rockets and bombs often land before the air raid signal goes off,” Archbishop Gudziak told OSV News while surveying the remains of a once-upscale apartment building on the outskirts of Kharkiv. The face of the structure had been sheared off, revealing the remnants of residents’ apartments amid dangling concrete slabs and gnarled metal supports. In one unit, a bookcase could be seen; in another, glassware was visible on kitchen shelves. Dust and debris littered the site.

“This is all over Ukraine. This is happening every day,” Archbishop Gudziak said. “Scores of people killed almost daily — civilians in their homes, somebody having dinner, somebody sleeping, somebody nursing their child.”

The archbishop also traveled to the nearby Epicenter home improvement mall in Kharkiv, which had been struck by two glide bombs May 25, killing 19 and wounding 48. Among those slain were Iryna Myronenko, a first-year catechetical student at Ukrainian Catholic University, and her 12-year-old daughter Mariya.

“(Iryna) was trying to bring the Good News of the Lord to children,” Archbishop Gudziak, the university’s founder and president, told OSV News. “The family came here to buy a faucet. … (They were just) people going shopping.”

He added that “the bodies of Iryna, Mariya and other victims were unrecognizable,” having been “burned beyond recognition” and only identified through DNA analysis. Iryna’s husband Yuri, who along with the couple’s other daughter survived the attack, had been “burned trying to save them,” he said.

“Those who want to destroy this country do it piece by piece, and person by person,” said Archbishop Gudziak.

As the archbishop was en route to Odesa, Ukrainian Catholic University mourned the loss of another student, 18-year-old Daryna (“Daria”) Bazylevych, who along with her mother, Yevgenia, and two sisters — Emilia and Yaryna, ages 7 and 21 — was among 7 killed in a Sept. 4 pre-dawn strike on more than 50 civilian buildings in Lviv. The family’s father and sole survivor, Yaroslav, sustained blast injuries to his face. Thousands poured into the streets of Lviv for the Sept. 6 funeral, which was broadcast in full.

While in Odesa, Archbishop Gudziak spent time at the home of grieving father and widower Serhii Gaidarzhi, who lost his wife Anna and their 4-month-old son Tymofii in a March 2 drone attack that killed 12 in all, including five children. The couple’s 2-year-old daughter, Lizi, and Serhii survived. A devout Baptist, Gaidarzhi traveled to the U.S. in April to meet with House Speaker Mike Johnson, a fellow Baptist, about the urgency of unblocking stalled aid to Ukraine.

Gaidarzhi told Archbishop Gudziak that with the help of a translator he had shared his story with Johnson, after which the two had prayed together.

“Two hours later, (Johnson) made his statement” in favor of aiding Ukraine, Gaidarzhi said. Following supper, the archbishop joined Gaidarzhi and his extended family in praying the Our Father.

Just outside the city of Zaporizhzhia, Archbishop Gudziak prayed at a military cemetery, comforting a family mourning at the grave of a fallen soldier. At the request of the slain man’s bereaved fiancée, the archbishop blessed the grave of a fellow soldier whose remains had been committed without any ceremony.

“She didn’t know the soldier; she just saw that there were no family there and no clergy,” the archbishop told OSV News.

During his time in both Odesa and Zaporizhzhia, Archbishop Gudziak met with the local staff of Caritas — part of the universal Catholic Church’s international humanitarian aid network — to learn in detail about efforts to assist Ukrainians as Russia’s invasion approaches its 11th year.

In Zaporizhzhia city — which remains under Ukrainian control, although a portion of the surrounding region is held by Russian occupiers who have banned the UGCC, Caritas and the Knights of Columbus — Archbishop Gudziak spent time with clergy and parishioners at Mother of God, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Founded in a small, nondescript building in 2016, the parish has grown significantly, and features a new church, a catechetical center and a vibrant Catholic school named for education pioneer St. John (Don) Bosco.

Students at the school smiled and clustered around the archbishop, who watched as one girl completed a brightly colored pastel drawing of flowers. Raising her eyes from her artwork to glance at Archbishop Gudziak, the girl remarked, “Oh, look — God has visited us!”

Also in Zaporizhzhia, an 11-year-old boy named Andrii — whose father had been killed in the war — approached Archbishop Gudziak following a daily morning Mass at the Roman Catholic Co-Cathedral of the Merciful Father, saying that he wanted to be a priest. The archbishop gently laid his hand on the boy’s head and blessed him in the shadow of a statue of St. John Paul II, who had donated the church’s cornerstone, taken from St. Peter’s Basilica in 1998.

Such moments shone against the backdrop of trauma, loss, battle fatigue and torture experienced by many who asked the archbishop to continue raising awareness of their plight.

Oleh Pylypenko, the elected head of the Shevchenkove united territorial community in Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region, described to Archbishop Gudziak and Father Taras Pavlyus, pastor of the village’s Holy Trinity UGCC parish, his three months in Russian captivity after he was seized while distributing food and medicine.

“(The Russians) know how to destroy. You need to spread this (awareness) at every level. Ukraine is fighting for the whole world, for civilization,” Pylypenko — who was tortured and later released in a prisoner exchange — told Archbishop Gudziak and Father Pavlyus, before presenting OSV News with a piece of shrapnel from one of the attacks.

Yet the grim reality of Russia’s war and atrocities in Ukraine has not suffocated the people’s faith, the archbishop told OSV News.

He pointed to Catholic priests who had “developed their parishes” despite “great opposition” from Moscow-leaning Orthodox leaders, with Bishop Mykhaylo Bubniy of the UGCC Exarchate of Odesa “doubling his diocese in parishes and clergy” over the last decade.

Several churches the archbishop visited were under active expansion and repair. At St. Demetrius in Kharkiv, which had been badly desecrated with holy images defaced under Soviet rule, OSV News filmed a cassocked Archbishop Gudziak as he scaled to the roof to survey its ongoing cupola building project.

Following an evening of prayer and fellowship with parishioners at Transfiguration of the Lord in Lozova — some 90 miles south of Kharkiv, and a former Orthodox parish that entered into full communion with the UGCC in 2021 under Archbishop Ihor Isichenko — Archbishop Gudziak exclaimed, “I want all my parishes to be like yours!”

Ukraine has become “an epicenter of global change,” with Ukrainians “defending our common, God-given human dignity … the democratic world … freedom of religion and … the international order of law,” Archbishop Gudziak told OSV News.

“What is happening here is prophetic,” he said. “The question is, will the prophets be heard?”

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