“Helping these people is a great challenge for the Church. Very often you can’t do anything but be next to them, cry with them, hold the hand of that woman or that soldier who is experiencing pain. This is the greatest pastoral challenge for me and for the Church today,” she stated.
The Major Archbishop also indicated that, in the regions already occupied by the Russian army, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has been forced to go underground. “There are no Catholic priests in this part of Ukraine anymore. “We received information that in Donetsk our parishioners went to church to pray every Sunday, even without the priest, but the church was confiscated and closed,” he noted.
Likewise, he recalled the case of priests Ivan Levitskyi and Bohdan Heleta as an example of the persecution to which the clergy is subjected in the country. Both priests were kidnapped by the Russian militia in November 2022 and their whereabouts are still unknown today.