Dear Friends:
As I write these words, the world witnesses the ominous events unfolding in Ukraine, whose citizens
now experience the violence and terror of an invading force. It would be sufficiently terrible if only
armies met on the battlefield, but the specter of civilians—children—in mortal danger shocks the
conscience. In one of his visits to the U.S. (prior to 9/11), Pope John Paul II reminded American
Catholics how we were blessed never to have witnessed the horrors of war in our lifetime. Sad to say,
we have since undergone the pain and upheaval of terrorism, but the citizens of Ukraine face the very
real possibility of their nation’s destruction. As a priest I can offer no sage wisdom vis-à-vis the
military or political dimensions of the situation. All I can urge our community to do is “storm” heaven
with prayers for peace and true justice.
For those of us who have as yet no direct involvement in the conflict, the reality of war raises profound
questions, among them how a good, wise, loving God can allow such evil to exist. The very question
marks a transition in the life of a soul from the state of callow innocence to hard won experience, when
a human being first encounters malice and depravity on a wide scale. Writing at the height of World
War II, a French philosopher, Simone Weil, found her only solace amid the outrages of the Holocaust
in the suffering of Jesus. She may not have been baptized (for a number of reasons), but she saw in the
Crucified Christ the hand of God reaching into the depths of human sin, suffering, anguish, and
anxiety. She writes:
Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies
locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the
next without meeting death’s face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it
can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn introduces the same
necessity; and days piled on days make years. On each one of these days
the soul suffers violence.
I realize this is not a happy or comfortable subject to contemplate, but perhaps the first thing that we
American Catholics can do is to attend to the constant threat under which our Ukrainian friends—many
of them fellow Catholics—are currently living. The Psalmist pours out his anguished heart to God:
“How long, O Lord?” (Ps. 13:1). So what are we to do? Through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving we
turn our hearts to God, and search for a concrete response to the misery we see in our world.
This week the Church honors St. Frances of Rome (1438-1440), a married mother of three who
suffered the loss of her husband and two sons; she is a patron saint of widows. Frances was also a
mystic who, according to her biographer, turned both her physical and spiritual suffering toward a
tender love for God and neighbor. Having learned the power of forgiveness, and returning good for
evil, she won over her harshest critics with a love so pure as to bring comfort to the sick, consolation to
those in distress, and reconciliation to enemies. Today’s artwork by Giovanni Battista Gaulli (1639-
1790) shows that Frances was touched by a grace that extinguished within her the tyranny of “I.”
Simone Weil would approve.
Faithfully,
Fr. Valentine