Married men have been ordained to the Catholic priesthood since time immemorial in the Eastern Churches, and Chicago-born Julian Hayda comes from a long line of Ukrainian Greek Catholic priests which stretches back 400 years. I am a couple of minutes into my meeting with him when his phone rings. “It’s my wife,” he says. I encourage him to take the call, and we go onto mute for a couple of minutes while I make a mental note of the predictably dull décor of the hotel room in Washington, DC, where he is billeted. 

He returns soon enough. “I’m sorry. We need to keep in regular contact at the moment. She’s used to going to voicemail when we’re in different time zones or I’m in a liturgy, but, well, you know.” Indeed I do, and no apology is needed, for there is now nothing normal about the situation in which Hayda and his wife Summer find themselves. He is a Ukrainian Greek Catholic seminarian for the Eparchy of Chicago, and is a student at the Seminary of the Three Holy Hierarchs on the outskirts of Kyiv. He has been studying remotely since before the invasion, when the seminary took its teaching online. 

A deadly attack on Brovary, just to the north of the seminary, has already killed several of its neighbours. As the situation has unfolded, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav of Kyiv—revered by the Ukrainian Catholics as their de facto patriarch—has invoked the help of St Michael, one of the country’s patrons, in the fight for Ukraine. The archangel’s statue stands, flaming sword in hand, atop the Lach Gates to Independence Square in central Kyiv. Archbishop Sviatoslav is now offering spiritual leadership from another location. Some seminarians have joined him in this ministry, but others have been sent to the relative safety of western Ukraine, or home to the USA, Italy, Croatia, and the UK.  

Earlier this week the Catholic News Service interviewed Bohdan Mandziuk, from Coventry, who is now back in London; he spoke of his experience of being separated from his community, and the reality of hearing explosions in the background of video calls. All the seminarians have taken up different work: they are serving as stretcher bearers, firemen, and relief workers; to each his different gifts according to grace. They have been urged to remain “spiritual people”, and have been forbidden from taking up arms—for now. Meanwhile, at a time when Ukrainians are fleeing in their hundreds of thousands, Hayda is returning to join them.

Before he entered the seminary Hayda was a journalist, producer, and filmmaker; he is now preparing to work on the ground with US media outlets. When we spoke, he had just completed a week of intense live-scenario exercises in the Appalachian Mountains as part of his press-safety training. He is clear that this development is not a departure from his vocation to holy orders, but in some ways a fulfilment of it—if not necessarily one that was expected or desirable. He and Summer were going to move to Ukraine while he continued his studies; he obviously longs to return to the community in which he is being formed, but in this moment he is answering the call to do what he can for a people whom he loves.  

Like any other war reporter, Hayda’s role will be a vital part of ensuring that accurate news is able to reach the outside world as the situation continues to deteriorate. Importantly, it will need to serve as a contradiction of the well-oiled Russian propaganda machine. It will have much to do with knowledge, truth, and the effective dissemination of both; all essential qualities of priesthood. He is clearly passionate about his calling; he talks of empathy and co-suffering love, of human dignity, and of the martyrs with whose blood the Church in Ukraine has been so liberally sprinkled in the past.  

The last point hits home, and hard. Before we part company Hayda shows me his kit bag, packed for swift deployment, and his flak-jacket. “There’s a helmet on its way, too”, he reassures me with a smile. The jacket has “PRESS” emblazoned across it in large white letters, but whether Russian forces will observe the Geneva Convention in relation to journalists remains to be seen. I am suddenly conscious that by the time our interview appears Hayda may well be deep inside a war zone. Later that day I go into the church across the road, where I light two candles.

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