Dear Coworkers in the Gospel,
Once a year, we gather with our Country Coordinators, who are noble brothers and sisters who work with us around the world. At last year’s meeting, Andrzej Lewek, from Poland, asked if I would come to Ukraine to help strengthen the hard-pressed brothers and sisters there, with a special focus on priests. I believe that I’m particularly called to do whatever I can to help support priests in their front-line ministry, so I said yes.
As the time to leave for Ukraine got closer, various people expressed concern about the danger of going to a country at war. I checked with the State Department’s list of threat levels in various countries, and Ukraine was listed at Level Four—the highest threat level, with the recommendation: “Americans should not go to Ukraine.”
When I asked Andrzej to check with our contacts there, they indicated that the western part of Ukraine, particularly Lviv, where we would be going, was seldom targeted by the Russians and was relatively safe. While recognizing that there was a basis for people’s concern, I felt peace about going, and so I went. Peter Herbeck suggested that I invite both Andrzej and Slovakian Country Coordinator Bohus Zivcak to join me. That turned out to be an excellent suggestion!
I flew from Detroit to Amsterdam and then connected with a flight to Krakow, Poland, where Andrzej, his wife, and one of his daughters met me at the airport. The airport has a very nice Catholic chapel, with the Blessed Sacrament present and images of St. John Paul II, the Divine Mercy, and Our Lady of Czestochowa. We stopped in the chapel to pray before leaving the airport. Andrzej said goodbye to his wife and daughter, and we took the train from the airport to the main train station in Krakow. From there, we took a train to Przemysl, the last city in Poland before the border with Ukraine. We met up with Bohus, who had driven from Slovakia, and we all stood for two hours in a very long line of perhaps a thousand people, waiting to be cleared by Polish customs to get on the train, which left almost at midnight—an hour late. The Ukrainian customs officials were on the train and kept checking people’s identification and walking by with dogs to make sure nobody was bringing drugs into the country. We arrived in Lviv at about 3 a.m., and since there is a curfew between midnight and 5 a.m.—when nobody can be out or driving—we had to find a driver with special permission to break the curfew and take us to the retreat center where we were going. Fortunately, our Ukrainian hosts were able to find such a driver for us. Only a little way into our journey—which was very dark since most of the city’s streetlights are turned off at night to save electricity—we were still pulled over by a police car with flashing lights. The officer wanted to make sure that the driver had a permit to break curfew. Fortunately, he did, and we continued on our way. I asked why there was a curfew and got various answers, the most common of which was to disguise troop movements.
The retreat was intended for leaders of various communities and prayer groups, many associated with the Charismatic Renewal. Most were from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church—which, since the late sixteenth century, has been the largest of the Eastern Rite Churches united with Rome. There were only about twelve priests and twelve religious sisters present, which was considerably fewer than we expected. However, this gave me the opportunity to get to know these priests rather well. In fact, Bohus and I spent two whole afternoon sessions with them in addition to all we did when they were part of the larger group. I gave eight talks and led three workshops during the week, and Bohus and Andrzej each gave two general session talks and helped in two workshops.
One interesting aspect of this encounter with the priests is that almost all of them are married with children. Ukrainian Catholic priests cannot be married after they are ordained, but they can get married before ordination. One of the priests told me that he is the son and grandson of priests and served in the same parish as his father! It was a new and wonderful experience.
Seeing the change that happened in some of these priests made the whole trip worthwhile. One young priest told me that he had been going through a crisis of faith ever since the confusion started in Rome concerning what he thought was settled doctrine and morality. He mentioned that the last two months before the retreat was a time of great darkness. Thankfully, he said the deep faith and conviction that characterized our talks, as well as our bold and clear affirmations of basic truths that are under attack today, dispelled the darkness. He said he was leaving the retreat full of light, joy, and confidence in the inspiration and inerrancy of Sacred Scripture and the truths of our faith. I was incredibly grateful to God to hear this.
Several other priests said that our clear exposition of Scripture concerning the need to balance God’s mercy and justice dispelled some deception they were under that hindered their confident proclamation of the Gospel.
They also expressed that the emphasis in Greek Catholic and Orthodox Churches on the need to make the Divine Liturgy the center of Christian life sometimes leads to an emphasis on getting the intricacies of the form right while neglecting real spiritual participation in the sacrifice and the need for evangelization and spiritual growth of the laity. The retreat opened their eyes to this.
The chaplain at the Catholic University of Lviv also told me his amazing testimony. He was away from the Lord when he listened to a radio program featuring a Pentecostal preacher. During that program, he was convicted of sin, repented, and turned his life over to the Lord. He thought at first that a dynamic Christian life open to the Spirit wasn’t possible in the Greek Catholic Church, but then someone gave him a copy of my book Hungry for God. He read it and was amazed to find that such a life was possible in the Catholic Church. He not only renewed his life as a Catholic but is now a very dynamic priest. Praise the Lord!
In fact, a Ukrainian publishing house published a new edition of Hungry for God a few months ago, retitling it Thirsty 
for God. When I told our newsletter editor this, she remarked that this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication of Hungry for God. Amazingly, it has never been out of print during that time!
The liturgies were truly beautiful, with amazing singing and glorious vestments. One day, we attended a liturgy celebrated for the conference attendees at the seminary of the Greek Catholic Archdiocese of Lviv by the archbishop himself, whose vestments were particularly heavenly. We visited with him after the liturgy. I asked about the biggest challenge facing the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, and he said that it is the great influx of refugees from the fighting in eastern Ukraine. (Five-million Ukrainians have left the country, and two million are displaced within the country.) Besides the need for housing and food, he said there is a great need for therapy, as many have been traumatized by the war. I hope people can also bring spiritual healing to them. Our mission teams often do this by utilizing a simple approach to inner healing and deliverance developed by Neal Lozano, called the Five Keys of Unbound.
The archbishop added that while most Ukrainians have been baptized, hardly any of them really know what that means, and it is hard to get them to come to church. About 180 men are in the seminary, but there used to be 260. One of the priests later told me that in the 1990s, in the decade after communism collapsed and the Greek Catholic Church was no longer outlawed, there was a great wave of renewal in the Church. The churches were full, and there were four or five applicants for the seminary for every place available.
This, unfortunately, is the story of most of Eastern Europe’s Catholic countries. Western materialism has gripped the souls of many, and there has been a radical fall-off of church attendance and vocations. Peter Herbeck was recently in Lithuania, where Renewal Ministries has been serving for over thirty years. We witnessed the wonderful flowering of the Church there after years of persecution, but now we see its sorrowful decline. In one diocese where there were over one-hundred seminarians not many years ago, there are now less than twenty. In Ireland, there is only one seminarian for the Archdiocese of Dublin, and only seventeen for the whole country in the multiyear process of formation.
During the evening session, we prayed individually for almost every person there; people received this prayer with great joy. Many “rested in the Spirit” but some seemed eager to fall over, which made me uncomfortable.
One concern I had from the beginning of our trip regarded the complexities of making my return flight from Krakow. As soon as reservations open up—only nineteen days before departures—they almost immediately become fully booked. Andrzej got up early on the designated day, but all reasonable trains were already booked. He said he should have gotten up at midnight, but he didn’t know. The reservations he did get only gave us a half hour to make our connecting train in Przemysl, which did not seem likely, given the lengthy delays at the border.
So, Bohus came up with a plan. On Sunday morning, our last day there, someone would drive us to the border. We would cross on foot and then try to find a taxi to take us to Przemysl, where Bohus had left his car. He then would drive us to Krakow. Once we realized the train was an unrealistic option, we also had to acknowledge that with other ways of getting across the border, we risked having to wait as long as six hours or longer due to backed-up border stations.
The plan worked, although not without some interesting happenings. We got across the Ukrainian side of the border in about a half hour, although there were a few tense moments when the border guard entered my passport into his computer and frowned. He called another guard to look at the computer and look at me. Then they called their superior. Eventually, they accepted my passport and let me go though. Then, unexpectedly, there was a huge wait to enter Poland. We stood in the hot sun for about an hour, with the line initially not moving at all and then moving very slowly. There were two lines, one for European Union (EU) citizens—meaning both Bohus and Andrzej—and another one that consisted primarily of Ukrainians trying to leave their country that also included me, very near the end of the line. We later learned that Ukraine closed the border shortly after we got through. We do not know why or for how long.
Finally, Andrzej asked the border guard if his American friend could go with him through the EU line, which was very short. The guard said that the American government had negotiated permission with the EU for this! It was great to hear! We went through without a hitch, and the Polish computers did not have any trouble with my passport. Meanwhile, Bohus had found a taxi, and we were on our way to Pryzemsyl. I spent that night in a hotel near the airport, visited the holy chapel again, made my flights, and was glad to be back while also being very thankful I was able to support my brothers and sisters in Ukraine. Many said that the most important part of our ministry was simply that we were not afraid to come and encourage them. They experienced our presence with them in this stressful time as a big support.
As I checked my phone in Amsterdam, I received messages from Bohus and others, saying that the day after we left, the Russians launched the largest missile and drone strike since the war began. The attack even targeted power stations in the far West, in the Lviv area. We need to ask God to have mercy on all those profoundly affected by the war and to bring peace. I could not help thinking of what Mary said to St. Jacinta as she was dying in the hospital in Lisbon: Wars are a punishment for sin. And what a punishment they are!
At the same time, we know that God has a plan to bring good out of all this horror. A little indicator of this to us was that we left Ukraine and arrived in Poland on the vigil of the feast of Our Lady of Czestochowa. I left for the US on her feast day.
Thank you for your prayers and financial support, which enables us to help brothers and sisters like these all over the world.
Your partner in the Gospel,
Ralph
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I am so glad the someone like you came to Ukraine. I am a 76 year old American currently living in Lutsk. I go to St. Peter and St. Paul Roman Catholic Church. I also go often to the main Orthodox Church to pray, only a two minute walk from my flat. I am with YWAM a Protestant Mission Organization. Yes, they all know I am Catholic, but have know me since 2004 before I reverted in 2012. I also worked with a Protestant Pastor and his family in Kremenchuk, Central Ukraine. I even got to share/preach in his church and at charity events, and about Baptism. He had a rule, that you do not mention other Religions. He had a Catholic friend from Poland who came to Ukraine to give Humanitarian Aid. This man did the Alpha Course in his Catholic Church in Poland and encouraged my friends to do this course. So, he taught them. Yes, he preached in the church. When I lived in Kyiv, I went to the Central Greek Catholic Church. I also attended the Roman Catholic Church in Tbilisi Georgia. On Sunday after Mass here in Lutsk, Caritas has a coffee shop that youth with Down Syndrome operate. I have had coffee with Bishop Vasily and some of the priest and parishioners! Thanks for coming and encouraging, teaching, priest and sisters!