In Ukraine, everyday life is the Way of the Cross

In what Pope Francis has repeatedly called “the martyred people of Ukraine,” we can see many traces of Jesus’s Passion and Crucifixion. This Holy Week, ACN invites you to meditate on the modern Way of the Cross.

During Holy Week, Catholics all over the world meditated on the suffering of Jesus through the ancient practice of the Way of the Cross, a devotion composed of 14 stations, each one contemplating a different moment of Christ’s suffering.

But for many people, the Way of the Cross is not something they need to imagine. In Ukraine, for example, the entire society is walking the Way of the Cross. How many fathers, sons, and brothers have been condemned to die in this war? How many have felt hopeless as they bid their wives and children farewell, not knowing if they would ever return? And how many of those who did return are dead within, wracked with trauma?

Jesus carried the Cross, and there are many crosses now in Ukraine. Ihor, a seminarian, knows a bit about that. He was born with a congenital condition that affects his mobility and has to undergo regular operations. When the war broke out, he was on his way to Poland for surgery, and when he arrived at the border, it was chaos. There, he understood what real crosses are like. “What I saw there was indescribably awful. Everything was blocked by refugees from Kharkiv, desperately hoping for a way out. Many passed their children over the border fence to anyone, just to get them to safety. It was heartbreaking.”

Jaroslav falls three times

Tradition holds that Jesus fell three times while carrying the cross to Calvary. Jaroslav, too, has fallen three times. The first time was when he suffered an accident that crippled his hand, leaving him unable to work. Then, in 2014, when his home city of Donetsk became the site of battle between separatists and the Ukrainian army, he left everything and travelled to Zaporizhzhia, only to spend the last of his savings on a flight to Lviv in 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Fortunately, Jaroslav found the Albertine Brothers, who have helped him get back on his feet.

The fourth station of the Way of the Cross is Jesus meeting His mother on the way to His execution. How can one not think of Mary’s suffering now? Psychologist Lyudmila Serhiyivna sees this sort of suffering every day, at the retreats she runs for mothers of missing or dead soldiers. “Women who have a lost a child isolate themselves and put their families under strain because they can’t get over their sorrow. I always worry about what I can say to these women, but then I am astonished at how much they change in such a short time, regaining their courage to face life,” she said to an ACN delegation that visited the country in solidarity.

Some stations of the Way of the Cross refer to the generosity of onlookers. In one instance, Simon of Cyrene carries the Cross for Jesus, and in another, Veronica cleans His face. Later, Joseph of Arimathea asks Pilate for Jesus’s body and buries Him. Before the war, the Albertine Brothers were already helping people in need. The invasion in 2022 just added to their work. “The Albertine Brothers are like emergency personnel, first aid. The man on the street under stress, someone who is freezing, someone very hungry. This is our everyday life. We’re here for that. Most of our residents are alcoholics, homeless people, refugees, people with drug or gambling problems. For them, there is hot soup. There is coffee and bread. We expect it to be enough for about 300 people,” Brother Bernard says to ACN.

Women also help in so many ways. Just like the women of Jerusalem who Jesus met on His long climb to Calvary, and who wept for Him, they, too, display a particular courage. Similar to the residence of the Albertine Brothers, there is a convent for religious sisters of the same congregation, which houses dozens of women who need help, some of them young mothers with babies.

Jesus is stripped and humiliated

When Jesus finally made it up the hill, He was stripped naked and humiliated. War is always a useful cover for those who like to humiliate and destroy the humanity of others. How can one forget the stories from Bucha, in the first months after the invasion? When the Ukrainian army regained control of the town, mass graves were uncovered, holding the bodies of hundreds of civilians who had been tortured and executed. Many of the victims were children; some were raped and burned; many were simply shot in the back of the head.

Jesus was executed. Nailed to a cross. Inna felt her husband die twice. He was killed in the first stages of the war in 2014, and the city of Irpin put up a poster in his honor. When the Russians invaded in 2022, Inna fled Irpin, leaving everything behind. She later learned that occupying soldiers shot through the poster. She felt like they killed him a second time.

In 2022, Olha also lost her husband. She remembers speaking to him in the evening, and suggesting he get some rest, because he sounded so tired. They never spoke again. “I was told that the building he was in came under fire, that he received a head injury and fought for his life for 40 minutes,” she said during an ACN visit to Ukraine.

In the fourteenth station, Jesus is laid in the tomb. It can be hard to imagine something more painful than burying a loved one, but many Ukrainians have learned that the uncertainty of not even knowing if their husband, father, or son is alive can be even worse. Seminarian Vitalij lost his father in December 2022, on the frontline near Bakhmut. At the memory of him, his light blue eyes cloud over, but then he describes how his grandmother comforted him with the fact that they could at least bury his father and were not haunted by uncertainty about his fate.

But the end of the suffering in the Way of the Cross is a source of consolation for Christians. Jesus rose again. As Ukrainians pray for the war to end, they, too, find courage in the faith that one day peace and joy will return to their lives. After all, that is what Easter is about, and this is what all Christians around the world pray for in these times.

—Filipe d’Avillez