ACN and Faith & Reason Institute launch “Faith Under Siege” podcast

Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is first guest on series of broadcasts about Christians suffering for their faith.

The Christians of Ukraine are practicing an “existential ecumenism” amid an ongoing siege from the country’s longtime nemesis, said the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

Christians are “united in our response to save human lives — cooperating, helping each other,” says His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, in an interview with Dr. Robert Royal, president of the Faith & Reason Institute and a special consultant with Aid to the Church in Need-USA. “We would not ever ask who you are — Are you Orthodox? Are you Protestant? Are you Catholic? — in order to provide an adequate humanitarian aid to those people. And because of this vital cooperation between the Churches, we are united in our common voice in behalf of the victims of the war.”

His Beatitude Sviatoslav made the comments during the first episode of a new podcast series hosted by Dr. Royal, special advisor to the board of Aid to the Church in Need-USA on the matter of Christian persecution. The series will feature the stories and heartbreaking situations of Christians who are suffering for their faith around the world.

Dr. Royal is founder of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., and editor of the website The Catholic Thing. He is broadly respected as an expert on the persecution of Christians. Last year, he publishedThe Martyrs of the New Millennium, commissioned by Aid to the Church in Need. The book was a fresh look at martyrdom in the Church, published 25 years after his study The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century.

Royal’s new podcast series — “Faith Under Siege” — is part of a year-long collaboration with ACN-USA to increase awareness of the plight of Christians under fire around the world.

The interview with His Beatitude Sviatoslav comes just a month before the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – and 12 years after Moscow began its occupation of Crimea and fostered a separatist movement in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. Sviatoslav discusses some of the most pressing needs of the people his Church serves, especially the long-term project of addressing a growing problem of war trauma.

Freezing in Kyiv

Sviatoslav speaks from the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in Kyiv and appears on camera wearing a black vest over his cassock – apparently due to the extreme cold Ukraine is enduring at the moment. He tells Dr. Royal that many people are freezing because the Russian military continues to attack Ukraine’s infrastructure, knocking out power generation plants and leaving vast populations without light or heat.

“All Churches are trying to cooperate in order to provide electricity, heating for the people, food, shelter, all which is necessary to save a human life in the middle of a severe wintertime,” he says.

He expresses his gratitude for the solidarity of Christians in the West, especially Aid to the Church in Need, the pontifical foundation founded in 1947, which has supported the Church in Ukraine for decades.

“When this war started back in 2014, immediately Aid to the Church in Need helped us to provide humanitarian aid to the people who were in humanitarian emergency, especially in the eastern, southern and central Ukraine. So thank you very much for this cooperation, for saving literally human lives,” the prelate says.

He also links ACN’s longtime support for the training of seminarians with the ability of priests to assist people suffering from the effects of war today.

“Because we had these well-trained people, we were able to face those challenges of the war trauma, which we are going through right now.”

“Ukraine is wounded, but Ukraine is resilient,” he concludes. “But we have to take care of those people. So this long term program for mental health, for spiritual assistance to those who were injured psychologically, physically, will be our pastoral program for next decades.”

–John Burger