In an unnamed town in war-scarred north-eastern Ukraine, an enormous icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour watches over two dozen or so tired, weary people as they try to rest on mattresses laid out on the floor of the room in which they continue to shelter from the ongoing bombardment. A few rugs on the floor mitigate slightly the neon lights and the utility pipes, but it is very much still a basement and not much else. A boy—perhaps no more than twelve or thirteen—glances at his iPhone while his mother and sister sleep nearby.

This is one of the recently-established refuges run by the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, the order founded by the Italian St Alphonsus Liguori with the blessing of Pope Benedict XIV in the mid-eighteenth century. Dedicated to missionary work and the care of the poor, its members are better-known as the Redemptorists. They now have a worldwide presence; a quirk of Habsburg history and the diversity of the Church in Eastern Europe means that the Redemptorist presence in Ukraine belongs to the Greek Rite. 

Under decades of Soviet oppression it was battered, but not broken. The underground Church in Ukraine counted a number of Redemptorist priests who ministered secretly among the Catholic community; four Redemptorists were among the twenty-four Ukrainians who were beatified by St John Paul II in Lviv in 2001. Bishop Nicholas Charnetsky spent years in incarceration; so did Bishop Vasyl Velychkovsky, who was eventually poisoned. Fr Ivan Ziatyk was beaten to death, and Fr Zenon Kovalyk was crucified.

Just over twenty years ago, Pope John Paul led the Angelus from Kyiv airport shortly after his arrival in the country. “Land of Ukraine,” he began, “drenched with the blood of martyrs, thank you for the example of faithfulness to the Gospel which you have given to Christians the world over.” From neighbouring Poland, he knew full well the kind of suffering that the Ukrainian Catholics had endured under Communism. “So many of your sons and daughters walked in complete fidelity to Christ,” he went on, “[and] many of them remained constant even to the supreme sacrifice. May their witness serve as an example and a stimulus for the Christians of the third millennium.” 

The Ukrainian Redemptorists are overseen from Lviv, in the west—the Eparch of Lviv, Archbishop Ihor Vozniak is also a Redemptorist—but it has houses spread across the country, including in Crimea. In a recent letter to the international congregation—in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania—the provincial superior, Fr Andriy Rak CSsR, noted that “our confreres remain in north and east Ukraine, where they support the local people with prayer and deeds.” 

As the BBC reported new attempts at civilian evacuations from Irpin, near Kyiv, and Sumy, in the north-east, I spoke to Fr Taras Kchik CSsR about the situation on the ground. The connection was shaky, but he appeared on my screen in the familiar black habit of the Redemptorists, with its distinctive white collar at his throat. I asked him how his brethren in the relative safety of western Ukraine had felt as they saw the areas fall where their parishes are. 

“We were all very worried,” he conceded. “Now at least we get the occasional phone call or message. At the start all we knew was that the areas were under Russian control, and we did not know what had happened.” Although it was their own people who came first to the Redemptorist houses in the north and the east, no one has been turned away. “Their homes have been destroyed. Our brethren there are so busy keeping people going that they don’t have time to think about themselves. We are doing what we can from here to help by doing simple things like checking which local grocery stores are still open.” 

As for evacuation, he was clear that it still seemed safer to hunker down and keep people where they were: “we all saw what happened at Mariupol.” Some, however, have had no option but to make the perilous journey; Fr Taras’s monastery is presently home to an orphanage from Kharkiv. “The little ones are in our kindergarten,” he explained, “and the teenagers are in our retreat house. We are doing our best to look after them.” 

The youngest child is 3 months old. “They travelled for four days to get to us”, said Fr Taras. “What else were they supposed to do? They had nowhere else to go.”

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