Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Mar 6, 2022 / 02:00 am (CNA).
A photo of an unidentified man hugging a life-size crucifix in Ukraine went viral across social media platforms as Russia began its full-scale invasion of the country.
The image captures a quiet moment in the midst of chaos: A darkly-clothed man embraces the crucifix in a courtyard outside by wrapping his arms around the foot of the cross. While the photo does not show his face, it reveals Jesus’ face, bent down toward the man. Two passers-by walk past him against the backdrop of an ancient, towering church.
A man hugs a cross outside a monastery in Lviv, Ukraine, on Feb. 24, 2022, on the first day of Russia’s invasion. Courtesy of Dennis Melnichuk
The photographer, Dennis Melnichuk, snapped the image outside the Catholic Bernardine monastery and church in Lviv on Feb. 24. Then, he shared it with the world in a Facebook post.
At the time, Melnichuk told CNA, “I was feeling my heart quiver with unbelief and shock. Also, I felt faith rising in my heart.”
He spotted the man while walking to the church to pray.
“This was about three hours after the bombs went off in Kyiv; huge lines were at the banks, pharmacies, and stores as everyone was trying to stock up due to the uncertainty of what was to happen next,” Melnichuk recounted.
This man, instead, prayed at the foot of the cross.
In his caption for the photo, Melnichuk said that he and his wife, Anya, woke up to a phone call warning them that Kyiv was being bombed.
“Before heading east towards Ternopil, Ukraine, we went to grab groceries and extra cash from the ATM,” he wrote on Facebook. “We stood in line for about an hour to get our turn at the machine and found out that there was a $100 limit per person. The reality of martial law just hit us.”
“We are getting ready to help people get away and find housing for refugees — whatever we can do to help in this crisis,” he added.
Instead of fleeing, Dennis and his wife chose to stay in Ukraine to “be the hands and feet of Jesus on the ground,” their fundraising page reads. In other words, assisting and sheltering refugees through their ministry, Awakened Generation.
Awakened Generation, Melnichuk said, has worked to equip and activate the local church in worship, missions, and evangelism. Now, he told CNA, “we are serving refugees fleeing from the war and providing emergency relief and aid to those who are enroute west.”
“We are partnering with YWAM [Youth with a Mission] in Ukraine to give refugees a safe place to stop, sleep, eat, and rest, and help them find a safe way to get out west,” he added. “We have many groups coming in every day and are bracing for hundreds, even thousands, more.”
People can help them in multiple ways, he said: by praying and interceding, donating, and providing humanitarian aid, especially medical help.
Melnichuk comes from a Protestant background, he told CNA. While he himself is not Roman Catholic, he said that he “cherish[es] the rich history of Christ’s church, including it’s Catholic story.”
Both of his parents emigrated from Ukraine to the U.S., where they met and he grew up, he revealed in an online testimony in 2016. He later returned to the country as a missionary and has lived there for two and a half years. And, it seems, he and his wife have no plans to leave even as they help others escape.
“Our phones are slammed,” he wrote in a Facebook post on March 3. “We are getting hit with the first actual stream of refugees beginning the exodus out of crisis cities. The first wave was just a trickle compared to this. We’re doing our best to find answers and solutions.”
“Please pray for us to do this well,” he asked. “We need the grace of God.” In the meantime, he added, “I choose to keep smiling.”
“It is an honor to follow Jesus in a time like this,” he said in another post Wednesday. “Every day groups come in and we see the tired and shocked faces of people who have left everything behind and don’t know what lies ahead of them.”
“I have seen the church in Ukraine and around the world become one living body,” he said. “No labels or tag — just one purpose: love as we have been loved by God in Christ Jesus.”
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Archbishop Zbigņevs Stankevičs of Riga, Latvia (left), speaking during a Catholic conference in Warsaw in May 2022 on the natural law legacy of John Paul II (right.) / Photos by Lisa Johnston and L’Osservatore Romano
Warsaw, Poland, Jun 9, 2022 / 09:17 am (CNA).
Constant cooperation and dialogue among Catholic, Lutherans, Orthodox, and other Christian denominations have been crucial to protect life and family in the Baltic nation of Latvia, Archbishop Zbigņevs Stankevičs of Riga, Latvia, said during a recent Catholic conference in Warsaw.
In his speech, Stankevičs shared his personal ecumenical experience in Latvia as an example of how the concept of natural law proposed by St. John Paul II can serve as the basis for ecumenical cooperation in defending human values.
The metropolitan archbishop, based in Latvia’s capital, is no stranger to ecumenical work and thought. In 2001, he became the first bishop consecrated in a Lutheran church since the split from Protestantism in the 1500s. The unusual move, which occurred in the church of Evangelical Lutheran Cathedral in Riga, formerly the Catholic Cathedral of St. Mary, signaled the beginning of Stankevičs’ cooperation with the Lutheran church in Latvia, a cooperation that would ultimately become a partnership in the cause of life and the family. Since 2012, the archbishop has served on the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.
“I would like to present this ecumenical cooperation in three experiences in my country: the abortion debate, the civil unions discussion, and the so-called Istanbul convention,” Stankevičs began.
Entering the abortion debate
Ordained as a priest in 1996, Stankevičs struggled to find proper consultation for Catholic couples on natural family planning. It was then that he decided to create a small center that provided natural family planning under the motto “let us protect the miracle [of fertility].”
This involvement in the world of natural family planning would lead him into the heart of the abortion debate in Latvian society, and, ultimately, to the conclusion that moral discussions in the public square benefit from a basis in natural law, something emphasized in the teachings of John Paul II.
“I knew that theological arguments would not work for a secular audience, so I wanted to show that Catholic arguments are not opposed to legal, scientific, and universal arguments, but rather are in harmony with them,” Stankevičs said.
“[A] few years later our parliament introduced the discussion to legalize abortion. No one was doing anything so I decided to do something. I consulted some experts and presented a proposal that was published in the most important secular newspaper in Latvia,” the archbishop said.
Stankevičs’ article, “Why I was Lucky,” used both biological and theological arguments to defend human life. He noted that his own mother, when pregnant with him, was under pressure to get an abortion; “but she was a believer, a Catholic, so she refused the pressure.”
After the Latvian parliament legalized abortion in 2002, the different Christian confessions decided to start working together to protect the right to life and the family.
In Latvia, Catholics comprise 25% of the population, Lutherans 34.2%, and Russian Orthodox 17%, with other smaller, mostly Christian denominations making up the remainder.
“We started to work together by the initiative of a businessman in Riga, a non-believer who wanted to promote awareness about the humanity of the unborn,” the archbishop recalled.
“Bringing all Christians together in a truly ecumenical effort ended up bearing good fruits because we worked together in promoting a culture of life: From more than 7,000 abortions per year in 2002, we were able to bring it down to 2,000 by 2020,” he said.
Map of Riga, the capital of Latvia. Shutterstock
Ecumenical defense of marriage, family
Regarding the legislation on civil unions, another area where Stankevičs has rallied ecumenical groups around natural law defense of marriage, the archbishop said that he has seen the tension surrounding LGBT issues mount in Latvian society as increased pressure is brought to bear to legalize same-sex unions.
Invited to a debate on a popular Latvian television show called “One vs. One” after Pope Francis’ remark “who am I to judge?” was widely interpreted in Latvian society as approving homosexual unions, Stankevičs “had the opportunity to explain the teachings of the Catholic Church and what was the real meaning of the Holy Father’s words.”
After that episode, in dialogue with other Christian leaders, Stankevičs proposed a law aimed at reducing political tensions in the country without jeopardizing the traditional concept of the family.
The legislation proposed by the ecumenical group of Christians would have created binding regulations aimed at protecting any kind of common household; “for example, two old persons living together to help one another, or one old and one young person who decide to live together.”
“The law would benefit any household, including homosexual couples, but would not affect the concept of [the] natural family,” Stankevičs explained. “Unfortunately the media manipulated my proposal, and the Agency France Presse presented me internationally as if I was in favor of gay marriage.”
In 2020, the Constitutional Court in Latvia decided a case in favor of legalizing homosexual couples and ordered the parliament to pass legislation according to this decision.
In response, the Latvian Men’s Association started a campaign to introduce an amendment to the Latvian constitution, to clarify the concept of family. The Latvian constitution in 2005 proclaimed that marriage is only between a man and a woman, but left a legal void regarding the definition of family, which the court wanted to interpret to include homosexual unions.
The Latvian bishops’ conference supported the amendment presented by the Men’s Association, “but most importantly,” Stankevičs explained, “we put together an ecumenical statement signed by the leaders of 10 different Christian denominations supporting the idea that the family should be based on the marriage between a man and a woman. The president of the Latvian Jewish community, a good friend, also joined the statement.”
The Freedom Monument in Riga, Latvia, honors soldiers who died during the Latvian War of Independence (1918-1920). Shutterstock
According to Stankevičs, something strange happened next. “The Minister of Justice created a committee to discuss the demand of the constitutional court, and it included several Christian representatives, including three from the Catholic Church, which worked for a year.” But ignoring all the discussions and proposals, the Minister of Justice ended up sending a proposal to parliament that was a full recognition of homosexual couples as marriage.
The response was also ecumenical: Christian leaders sent a letter encouraging the parliament to ignore the government’s proposal.
According to Stankevičs, the proposal has already passed one round of votes “and it is very likely that it will be approved in a second round of votes, with the support of the New Conservative party. But we Christians continue to work together.”
Preventing gender ideology
The third field of ecumenical cooperation mentioned by Stankevičs concerned the Istanbul Convention, a European treaty which the Latvian government signed but ultimately did not ratify.
The treaty was introduced as an international legal instrument that recognizes violence against women as a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women.
The convention claims to cover various forms of gender-based violence against women, but Christian communities in Latvia have criticized the heavy use of gender ideology in both the framing and the language of the document.
The word “gender,” for instance, is defined as “the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men,” a definition that allows gender to be defined independent of biological sex and therefore opens the document to the question of whether it really is aimed at the protection of women.
Christian communities also question the biased nature of the committee designated to enforce the convention.
The governments of Slovakia and Bulgaria refused to ratify the convention, while Poland, Lithuania, and Croatia expressed reservations about the convention though it was ultimately ratified in those countries, a move the government of Poland is attempting to reverse.
“When we found out that the Latvian parliament was going to ratify it, I went to the parliament and presented the common Christian position,” Stankevičs explained. As a consequence of that visit, the Latvian parliament decided not to ratify the convention, Stankevičs said, crediting the appeal to the unity provided by the common Christian position argued via natural law.
“In conclusion,” the archbishop said, “I can say that in Latvia we continue to defend the true nature of life and family. But if we Catholics would act alone, we would not have the impact that we have as one Christian majority. That unity is the reason why the government takes us seriously.”
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