Ukraine’s Struggle: Where Heaven and Earth Have Met - Fr James Siemens on RISU

Like countless others both in Ukraine and around the world, I have been transfixed by events as they have unfolded over these last weeks and months. The world’s cameras and spotlights have been fixed on Kyiv and Ukraine as a whole in a way that they have not been in living memory, and perhaps ever. And as the world has watched, things have happened that I never in my wildest dreams would have thought possible. By this, I do not necessarily mean the obvious: the country’s liberation from a criminal Yanukovych and his thuggish rule by sheer force of the people’s will, or the ultimate exposing of Putin as a malevolent puppet master and military aggressor. Both scenarios have been breath-taking for what they imply, and yet for all that, they do not sufficiently reflect the utterly inspiring reality behind all that has happened.



As a priest living in a country where the biggest political threat is socially-enervating legislation, and where one of the biggest religious challenges may be overcoming the sheepishness that can accompany wearing a cassock in public, the testimony of faith in the midst of the Ukrainian crisis is simultaneously shaming and uplifting. By the word ‘faith’, it is not only the overt work of the Church to which I refer, although it is this I will shortly come to focus on; it is the incredible manifestation of human virtue on the part of those who have been caught up in events across the country, and have managed to stay the course. Watching the sheer bravery of those involved in Euromaidan, the actions of someone like Colonel Yuri Mamchur and his men at Belbek airbase in Crimea, the arrest of Father Mykola Kvych, and the ultimate sacrifice made by those such as Professor Bohdan Solchanyk of the Ukrainian Catholic University – whether in Kyiv or anywhere else in the country – is a testament to the eternal value of human virtue in the face of tyranny and oppression. This is a lesson the whole world can stand to hear, and especially those of us seeking to minister faithfully in less threatening contexts.



In the midst of everything, though, what has attracted my attention in a particular way is the example of the Church’s clerics on the frontlines since the dawn of Euromaidan. Many of the photos have received wide circulation: priests standing in the middle of a projectile-strewn square with the Cross, the Gospels, and a holy Icon; priests hearing confessions on the pavement; priests blessing; priests praying over the fallen. That these images should be in circulation is of tantamount importance because of what they say about the role of the Church, the nature of Ukrainian society, and the legitimacy of the protests, the aspirations of the people, and the current Ukrainian government, and it is heartening to know that they have given rise to as much discussion as they have.



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Ukraine’s Struggle: Where Heaven and Earth Have Met