As the Three Wise Men make their way home in the Latin Rite, many Eastern Christians will only just be ending the fast before the Nativity. On 6 January in the Gregorian Calendar it is only 24 December in the Julian Calendar, which is used by Ukrainian Catholics and several of the Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe.
Ten years ago, as a Latin priest in the Society of St John Chrysostom (a historic association promoting the Eastern Catholic Churches and working for reconciliation between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches), I was asked by Bishop Hlib Lonchyna to establish regular Divine Liturgies in English at the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, just near Bond Street in the heart of London.
The liturgical and spiritual patrimony of the historic Church of Kyiv, to which the Ukrainian and Russian Churches – both Catholic and Orthodox – are today’s heirs, embraces English speakers as well as the Ukrainian diaspora and others. And so for a decade I have lived richly as a priest with bi-ritual faculties, keeping two Holy Weeks, two Easters and two Christmases.
It has been a joy to be immersed within this spiritual rhythm these last ten years. But the last ten months have been heart-breaking to be with the people in their time of tears and anxiety. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine young people – women as well as men – left to defend their homeland. The displaced soon began to arrive in their stead: mothers and children, elderly relatives, those who had lost everything.
Standing with our Eparch, Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski, and the other priests at the altar has been humbling, as they have “kept calm and carried on” with the beautiful Liturgy that gives the faithful reassurance through its enduring beauty and the promises of Christ that he is constantly coming to them. Our Christmas Eve Compline is interspersed with cries of “God is with us!” – he will return them from exile as he returned from his own.
It has been moving to see the love, solidarity and practical help expressed by wider British society: from the King and successive Prime Ministers to local government and voluntary civil society. New friendships have been forged among the clergy and people of other Churches and faith communities; meanwhile the united presence of other Catholic priests, bishops and faithful at prayer and the Eucharist has truly proven the bonds of communion.
On Sundays at the Ukrainian Cathedral the congregation numbers up to 3,000 people; there are more at the great feasts. Not all are new to Britain; some are strengthening or reconnecting with their faith and practice. As the Eparch observed in the Catholic Herald at the start of the conflict, given the current stark alternatives in Eastern Europe of good and evil, the sacred and the secularised, the people of Ukraine choose God. Already, new mission points are being established in Cambridge, Stratford and Tooting Bec, with another revived at Bedford.
As for the Liturgies for the Anglophone faithful, all available space at Holy Family Cathedral has been turned over to a new Ukrainian Welcome Centre that offers a one-stop-shop for advice and support to displaced people and families, and those who have already arrived but are facing new difficulties. So, by the kindness of Cardinal Nichols, we have been taken in at Sacred Heart Church on the Horseferry Road, near Victoria Station in London.
There we now celebrate a weekly Sunday Liturgy at ten o’clock in the morning, so that this pastoral and spiritual outreach can grow as – inevitably – some of those displaced will be staying on and the Ukrainian Church’s eparchy is become an increasingly visible dimension of Britain’s Christianity as a whole.
Everyone has lost someone, or their home, or a livelihood, or security itself; or else they know someone who has. So the Church stands with the people. Fr Mykhailo Dymyd and his iconographer wife Ivanka, from Lviv in western Ukraine, lost their son Artemy as his army unit was serving in the east in Donetsk. Two Greek Catholic priests in the south east, Frs Ivan Levitskyi and Bohdan Heleta, have been arrested by Russian operatives and are feared tortured and denied medical help.
It is almost ten years since the Eastern Orthodox Metropolitan Paul and Syriac Orthodox Metropolitan John of Aleppo were abducted by the Islamic State in Syria during a humanitarian visit to encourage and pray with those affected by the war. They are presumed dead; martyrs of the witness to God Incarnate. The same evil assumed a new guise in 2022.
But at our Liturgies, most insistently at the feast of the Nativity, we include special petitions in our normally unchanging rite: to pray for the bravery, consolation and strength of the Ukrainian people in their trials and loss; to seek the protection of those who are defending freedom, virtue and truth; to ask the Lord that the peace, justice and goodness of his Kingdom will be victorious over the wickedness of war on the innocent – which threatens us all.
Fr Mark Woodruff is chairman of the Society of St John Chrysostom and Co-Secretary of the Catholic-Orthodox Pastoral Consultation in England. This article appears in the January edition of the Catholic Herald.
Photo: Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski welcomes the King and Queen (then the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall) to the Cathedral of the Holy Family, London, in March 2022. Toby Melville – WPA Pool/Getty Images
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