by ÁLVARO PEÑAS (Follow on X)
MADRID—Sviatoslav Shevchuk was born in a country that did not officially exist, into a church that had been abolished.
The Soviets outlawed the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1946, arrested its bishops, and sent its priests to the camps. For more than 40 years its five million faithful worshipped in forests, kitchens, and basements. Shevchuk grew up inside that, and he says the church was the small stone that toppled the Soviet Union.
Today, His Beatitude Sviatoslav leads that church in the open—Catholic, answering to the Pope, Byzantine in rite, dominant in western Ukraine. In the territories of Ukraine that Russia occupies, it is banned once more.
His new book is called Chronicle of a Sacrilegious War**.** The sacrilege is the Russian Orthodox Church, which blesses the missiles falling on Ukrainian cities and calls a war of aggression holy. He presented it here in May, and gave me this interview a few days after Ukraine’s Independence Day.
In the first part we spoke about the just war and about hatred. Here he talks about what a Ukrainian packs for a bomb shelter, what the Vatican is doing in Moscow, and why he believes Putin’s empire cannot be rebuilt.
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PEÑAS: In times of danger, every Ukrainian gathers their most essential belongings and runs to the bomb shelter, but in your book, you reflect on the need to also prepare a “spiritual emergency suitcase.” What do you pack in that spiritual suitcase?
SHEVCHUK: Above all, it is filled with prayer. People want to pray, and prayer is the breath of the soul. People who had never prayed before do so when they are under bombardment and seek out those who can teach them—the masters of prayer. There is a classic story of a disciple who approaches a spiritual teacher—a monk—and his first request is: “Father, teach me to pray.” This is what the apostles did with Jesus Christ. In every air-raid shelter there is a school of prayer, and we have many groups—such as the group of mothers who have lost their children in the war—who gather to pray together. Prayer is the first thing that must be in your spiritual suitcase.
You can’t sit in the bomb shelter isolated from others because if you shut yourself off, you’ll end up hurting yourself. That’s why singing helps us so much.
