“My dear friends, please pray for Ukraine and her families,” Bishop Mykola Cardinal Bychok in Singapore

Dear friends,

I would like to speak about the situation of the family in Ukraine.

Ukraine is still very much a “post-Soviet country” in as much as 70 years of evil, communist, atheistic and despotic rule in Ukraine has had a profound effect of Ukraine and her people.

One must understand that despite its goal of a communal life for the proletariat, communism in fact placed the individual above the family. Marx and Engels asserted that women’s emancipation would follow the abolition of private property, allowing the family to be a union of individuals. Building on this legacy, Lenin imagined a future when unpaid housework and childcare would be replaced by communal dining rooms, nurseries, kindergartens, and other industries. This was to “free” mothers from the “burden” of raising children and running a home.

The issue of individual freedom was so central to the revolutionary program that the Bolsheviks published decrees establishing civil marriage and divorce soon after the October Revolution, in December 1917. The persecution of religion removed the only real moral voice in society. The individual had to be loyal to the state, not to God, not to the family. Children were taught from an early age that they were to be loyal to the state and had a duty to report their parents to the authorities for “anti-Soviet” behaviour. This would often lead to children having their parents arrested, exiled to labour camps or executed.

Despite communist authorities rewarding mothers who had many children, this was not because they were pro family. They were to produce children to serve the state, work in factories and collective farms and ultimately defend the Motherland as cannon fodder on the killing fields of War. This is a situation that is repeating itself in modern Russia.

It was the communism which encouraged the use of contraception and abortion to free the individual. To this day Russia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world.

In Western part of Ukraine, which was not a part of the Soviet Union until 1945, the situation was somewhat different. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was the dominant faith in Western part of Ukraine until it was supressed and severely persecuted from 1946. Bishops, priest, religious were martyred in an attempt to extinguish the church’s moral voice in Society. In its place, Ukrainian Catholics were forced to worship in the Russian Orthodox Church, this Church, reestablished by the dictator Stalin was, and to a large extent still is, a state instrument of propaganda, control and persecution.

Ukrainian Catholics kept their faith! The Church went underground! It was the family that preserved the faith and passed it on to the younger generations. Priests and bishops operated in secret and often at great personal risk, many were martyred or became Confessors of the Holy Faith. But it was the grandmothers and mothers of the church that were central in maintain and passing on the faith in this time of persecution.

I remember this time of persecution from my childhood. For 11 years of my life, I lived in the Soviet Union during this time of persecution. I would like to share with you recollections that I have received from confessors of the faith and members of our underground Church. They would often speak about the importance of Vatican Radion transmitting the Divine Liturgy every Sunday morning. Families would gather dressed in their Sunday best, having prepared an altar with icons and candles to reverently participate in the radio Divine Liturgy. This was often done with great peril. The police could knock at the door at any time. Not withstanding the danger, families continued to gather to pray and worship God.

This fidelity to the Holy Church, to the underground bishops, to our exiled Patriarchs and to the Holy Father, strengthened families and was rewarded by many vocations that have blessed the Church. To this day, liturgical attendance in Western part of Ukraine is the highest in any part of the former Soviet Union. Yet even the Western parts of Ukraine are not immune from moral decay.

Since independence Ukraine has struggled with finding her place. A large majority of Ukrainians has wanted to break from the Russian Soviet world that has oppressed Ukraine for centuries and now looks towards Europe.

One of the greatest issues to affect family life in post-independence Ukraine has been the need of so many mothers and fathers to leave their families to look for work in Europe and beyond. These patents have been forced by poverty and unemployment to seek work outside Ukraine. Often children have been left with grandparents and have become disconnected with their parents. In some towns and villages, a whole generation has been lost, and the consequences of this are only now appearing.

There are those who decry Ukraine’s desire for European integration. They see it as Ukraine submitting to modern, degenerate, Godless European values. It is true that these values that Europe now sees as human rights are detrimental to the Christian family. But as Patriarch Sviatoslav has pointed out on more than one occasion of the positive effect that Ukraine and Ukrainians, together with other Eastern European countries can have on restoring Christian values to Europe.

In many countries of Europe, churches are once again full, not with locals but with Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans who have maintained the true faith!

Today, Ukrainian families have borne the heaviest and most painful blow of this barbaric war.

• 14 million people, mostly women and children and the elderly, were forced to leave their homes and their native lands. The war struck at the very heart of Ukrainian society, and this heart is the family, the family.

• Today, we have hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian families who were forced to leave their homes and lost their sense of security and family comfort because of the war.

• Tens of thousands of families are mourning the loss of their closest and dearest ones; often, as a result of missile attacks and bombings, entire families become victims of Russian aggression.

• Tens of thousands of our families have been separated, because the men are either at the front or cannot or do not want to leave the country to join their relatives who have found refuge abroad.

• Every Ukrainian family today is a suffering family, experiencing excruciating uncertainty, anxiety, stress and fear.

The topic of spiritual, psychological and social support for Ukrainian families and households is already on the agenda of our synodal meetings and all our pastoral work in Ukraine and in the places of Ukrainian settlement.

In a Message of the Synod of Bishops of the UGCC in 2021, our Bishops identified the treatment of war injuries and wounds as priority tasks for the coming years: “We cannot dream of the future of our Church if we do not reflect on the need to heal injuries — personal, family, community, church, national, historical and global. These wounds need healing with the mysterious, tender, personal touch of God. The healing power, the grace of the Holy Spirit, capable of healing the wounds of the past and the present, flows from the encounter with the living Christ, the Physician of the soul and body, who is revealed in the mutual love of His followers. And it is the Church, all her communities and institutions, that is and must be the bearer of this Source of healing” (“The Hope to which the Lord calls us”, Post-Synodal Message to the Synod of Bishops of the UGCC 2021, 4).

At the same time, the bishops called for special pastoral care for our families and households, quoting on this occasion the words of St. Pope John Paul II: “Whoever promotes the family promotes the development of the person; whoever attacks the family attacks the person. Around the family and around life, the most important challenge is unfolding today, which affects the very dignity of the person” (Ibid., 6, cf. General Audience of October 8, 1997).

The theme of the family is so important that the Synod of Bishops of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church chose the theme “Pastoral Care of the Family in Time of War” for the next Ukrainian Synod in July 2025.

My dear friends, please pray for Ukraine and her families. This war of aggression has taken a huge toll on family life. We are called as a Church and as individuals to act concretely. This requires us to stand in solidarity with Ukraine and her families. It requires us to be informed and to acknowledge the crimes that have been committed by Russia and to make sure that justice is seen to be done so that a lasting peace may prevail.

To defend families, we must face uncomfortable truths and see that salvation does not come from the “princes of this world” but from God alone.