Priests Of War - Part 1: Garrison Church, Lviv
Day 1, Death, hope and a nation taking a knee.
I arrived in Ukraine and, within 12 hours, was confronted with grief, honor, and a sense of faith that was extraordinary to me. It captured me.
There was no sense of why I had arrived, other than an inexplicable and undeniable calling to go. I didn’t know anyone in Ukraine, and I probably couldn’t point to Kyiv on a map.
The language? I don’t think I’d ever even heard it.
They were foreign. No .. I was foreign.
The story of my arrival and what happened to an American who showed up hours after a curfew went into effect in a city at war, below 20°F, with no idea where to go, is for another article. Here, I want to share with you the first priests of war I encountered.
Yuri, my handler, got me in contact with a Catholic Priest named Fr. Roman, a priest I’d soon become good friends with. He’s a military Chaplain and would be my first point of contact on the ground and the person I needed to get me off the street and into a seminary at 3 am.
The morning of December 20, I met Fr. Roman outside the Garrison Chuch of Saints Peter and Paul in Lviv. This would be my first exposure to the immense loss of life I would begin to see day after day; however, it would be the starting point for some of the most welcoming experiences I’d have in my life.
It wouldn’t occur to anyone how important the role of the Military Chaplain is to the Ukrainian people. Not the military, but to the everyday citizen. They are a nation in trauma, the churches are booked with funerals, and the amount of loss can’t be measured, it can’t be explained. It’s madness.
And, according to one of the great priests I met, it is this madness in which the enemy reigns. It is where confusion and uncertainty drench the people, and the diabolical is the origin of this madness. There is no other reason; where it makes no sense at all, there you will find the devil.
And this is precisely where the Chaplains will take up arms in the spiritual battle for the soul of Ukraine and her people. They provide the water of life to the grieving, the warm blanket of hope to the lost, they feed the hungry who starve for purpose, and they welcome the wanderer in the fog of war.
From the outside looking in, it’s immediately apparent how necessary these men are. Without their commitment to Christ and their imitation of His courage, I’m not certain their nation would have a future. With Them, all things are possible.
