PRAYER FOR UKRAINE- TODAY

 

A Prayer for Ukraine

God of peace and justice,
we pray for the people of Ukraine today.
We pray for peace and the laying down of weapons.
We pray for all those who fear for tomorrow,
that your Spirit of comfort would draw near to them.
We pray for those with power over war or peace,
for wisdom, discernment and compassion to guide their decisions.
Above all, we pray for all your precious children, at risk and in fear,
that you would hold and protect them.
We pray in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace.
Amen.

Archbishop Justin Welby (UK)
Archbishop Stephen Cottrell (UK)

Mother of God of Tenderness- Iryna Solonynka Ukrainian artist- Master of the Department of Sacred Art-          National Academy of Arts, Lviv 

 

 

INVASION ANNIVERSARY

 

 

 

February 24 marks the third anniversary of Russia's INVASION of UKRAINE in 2022. Though Ukraine has won many battles, the war for Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent, democratic nation rages on at a very steep cost. 

The U.S. has supported Ukraine—but now, the new U.S. administration has ended the support. How can we help support Ukraine, find an end to this death and destruction, and get the Russians to withdraw? At present it looks like prayer is  the only answer, and as European leaders meet to try and determine the next step in this mess, we can only pray for a peaceful solution.

This invasion was a violation of international law, breaking 75 years of peace in Central Europe.  Many felt Kyiv would fall in a week and the army would collapse, while President Volodymyr Zelensky would flee, abandoning his people. But the Russian tyrant miscalculated the strength, tenacity and bravery of the Ukrainian people, holding off the world’s third largest army for 3 years.

Russia has paid the price with sanctions which have led to economic problems, which is nothing compared to the loss of lives. More than 850,000 have been killed and wounded while a million men have fled the country to avoid military service. Russia has now reverted to using convicts, mercenaries, and North Korean troops to continue this war.

President Zelensky said that between 300,000 and 350,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the war compared to 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed.  Western officials estimate that Moscow is losing an average of 1,500 men, killed and wounded, every day. One has to remember that the Russian soldiers are not defending their own homeland, but rather fight in foreign land, hence not as committed,  as they are forced into a situation most would rather not be in.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has robbed millions of Ukrainians of their previous lives which once seemed stable and predictable. Even when the war ends, how will the Ukrainians rebuild their lives?  More than 2.5 million Ukrainians have lost their homes, 5 million Ukrainians are internally displaced, and an additional 6 1/2 million have become refugees abroad. Staggering statistics!

Ukraine’s independence and democratic future is for the security of all the West.  We pray for a rapid cessation of this unjust war  which will allow the rest of Europe to breath more deeply. Right now the future does not look good. We ask our Mother of Peace to intercede!

Paintings Ukrainian artists:

Top- Olenka Zahorodnyk

Right- Mariana Mykytiuk

VIRGIN of HODEGETRIA- HELP OUR MESS

 

 

The Marian icon of the VIRGIN of HODEGETRIA is the only example of UKRAINIAN art held in the Vatican Museums.  This sacred image dating from the seventeenth century, now more than ever cannot fail to evoke the suffering of the Ukrainian people in this dark moment.

 

Its history is linked to the figure of Saint John Paul II, who received this icon as a gift in Lviv in 2001, during his apostolic journey to Ukraine. Along with the original, which has deteriorated over time, the pontiff also received a copy with an ideal reconstruction of the missing parts. Both were donated in turn by Saint John Paul II to the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, until 2004 when they became part of the Vatican Collections.

Hodegetria is a Greek word that means " she who shows the way" or "the indicator of the way". It is also the name of a type of icon that depicts the Virgin Mary holding the Christ-Child and pointing to him. 

This icon, scarred and in some parts devastated, narrates today’s tragedy to us all, and in the face of the Child which is no longer present, there is the face of every Ukrainian child. Of every child who is an innocent victim of the folly of war. We can only ask our heavenly Mother for her intercession in the on-going mess, whch can only lead to more tragedy for the world!
 

BIRD COUNT IN FEBRUARY

February 14–17, 2025 is the annual Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC). Bird lovers everywhere unite in the effort to tally as many of the world's bird species as possible over these four days. Combined with other bird counts, such as the Christmas count, the GBBC results help create a clearer picture of how birds are faring. Are individual species declining, increasing, or holding steady in the face of habitat loss, climate change, and other threats?

The Great Backyard Bird Count is a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, National Audubon Society, and Birds Canada and is made possible in part by founding sponsor Wild Birds Unlimited.

More than a half-million people participated during the 2024 GBBC—double the number of participants in the past five years. They reported 7,920 species of birds from 200+ countries and subregions. 

First-timers should make it a point to read complete instructions on the GBBC website, where they will also find helpful birding tips and birding app downloads. The GBBC website also features a new map for marking local GBBC community events. As with other counts, birders can join up to help celebrate birds in their hometown. 

To take part in the 2025 GBBC, each participant or group counts birds for any length of time (but for at least 15 minutes) and reports the birds they can identify at each site they visit. While it is called the backyard count, it could also be a park, a wilderness area, apartment balcony, or a neighborhood street. For us on Shaw, it is the whole island, sea shore as well as woods and fields.

Two of my favorites on Shaw:

Top: American kestral- painting by David Stribbling- UK

Right:  Varied thrush- found only in winter

FATHER OF THE CHANT

 

The following letter may be of interest to those who follow the Liturgy. This letter is to the Abbot of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes (France), Dom Geoffroy Kemlin, from the Holy Father on the anniversary of the death of SERVANT of GOD DOM PROSPERO GUERANGER (Blog 11/21/2023).

 

As you celebrate this year the 150th anniversary of the death of your founder, Dom Prosper Guéranger, I am pleased to join in your thanksgiving. I wish to express my encouragement and my affectionate closeness to those who have committed their lives in the wake of this servant of the Church, or who are working to make his life and work better known. Benedic anima mea Domino. This verse from Psalm 102 was one of the last words he spoke before committing his soul to the hands of the Father on 30 January 1875.

In evoking Dom Guéranger, my predecessors have underlined the various expressions of his charism received for the edification of the whole Church: his role as restorer of Benedictine monastic life in France, his liturgical knowledge placed at the service of the People of God, his ardent piety towards the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, his work in support of the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and that of papal infallibility, his writings in defence of the freedom of the Church. I would also like to highlight two aspects of this charism that correspond to two current needs of the Church: fidelity to the Holy See and the Successor of Peter, particularly in the area of liturgy, and spiritual paternity.

Dom Guéranger was undoubtedly one of the first architects of the Liturgy Movement, the fruit of which would be the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium of the Second Vatican Council. The historical, theological and ecclesiological rediscovery of the liturgy as the language of the Church and an expression of its faith was at the heart of his work, first as a diocesan priest and then as a Benedictine monk. This rediscovery inspired in particular his publications favouring the return of the dioceses of France to the unity of the Roman liturgy, and it was this rediscovery that prompted him to write the volumes of L’année liturgique in order to make available to priests and lay people the beauty and riches of the liturgy, which is “the first wellspring of Christian spirituality” (Apostolic Letter Desiderio desideravi, no. 61). He strongly affirmed that “the prayer of the Church is the most pleasing to the ear and heart of God, and therefore the most powerful. Happy, then, is he who prays with the Church” (Preface to L’année liturgique). May the example of Dom Guéranger inspire in the hearts of all the baptised not only love for Christ and his Bride, but also filial trust and docile collaboration cum Petro et sub Petro, so that the Church, faithful to her living Tradition, may continue to raise “one and the same prayer capable of expressing her unity” (Apostolic Letter Desiderio desideravi, no. 61).

I would also like to evoke another aspect of the charism of Dom Guéranger: spiritual paternity. Attentive to the work of the Holy Spirit in souls, Dom Guéranger wanted only one thing: to help them in their search for God. Shaped by the Benedictine Rule and divine praise, his gentle and joyful confidence in God touched the hearts of the monks who came to gather around him, the nuns who benefited from his teachings, but also the men and women with responsibilities in the Church and society, and above all the fathers and mothers of families, the children, the little ones and the humble who sought his spiritual advice. In times of peace, as in times of adversity, they all found in him the strengthening or renewal of their faith, a taste for prayer and love of the Church. May his example of docility to the Holy Spirit and of service inspire and guide many of the faithful in the ways of the Lord, “meek and humble of heart” (Mt 11:29).

I pray that the work of the Servant of God Dom Guéranger may never cease to produce fruits of holiness in all the faithful, and that it may also remain a living witness to the fruitfulness of monastic life at the heart of the Church.

It is with this wish that I impart my Blessing to you, Reverend Father, and to your brothers of the Abbey of Saint-Pierre, to those of the Congregation of Solesmes, and to all those who will take part in the commemorations of the   return to God of Dom Prosper Guéranger. From Saint John Lateran,                                                                                                        January 31, 2025,   FRANCIS

 

CONSECRATED LIFE DAY

 

Today, February 2, is the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord and also the World Day for Consecrated Life, a commemoration instituted by Pope St. John Paul II in 1997. The World Day for Consecrated Life takes place on this feast the Holy Father explained, because “the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple is an eloquent icon of the total offering of one’s life for all those who are called to show forth in the Church and in the world, by means of the evangelical counsels the characteristic features of Jesus, the chaste, poor and obedient one.”

In his message for the 1st World Day for Consecrated Life, St. John Paul explained that the day has three purposes:

 In the first place, it answers the intimate need to praise the Lord more solemnly and to thank him for the great gift of consecrated life, which enriches and gladdens the Christian community by the multiplicity of its charisms and by the edifying fruits of so many lives totally given to the cause of the Kingdom …

In the second place, this day is intended to promote a knowledge of and esteem for the consecrated life by the entire People of God …

The third reason regards consecrated persons directly. They are invited to celebrate together solemnly the marvels which the Lord has accomplished in them, to discover by a more illumined faith the rays of divine beauty spread by the Spirit in their way of life, and to acquire a more vivid consciousness of their irreplaceable mission in the Church and in the world. Immersed in a world which is often agitated and distracted, taken up sometimes by the press of responsibilities, consecrated persons also will be helped by the celebration of this annual World Day to return to the sources of their vocation, to take stock of their own lives, to confirm the commitment of their own consecration.

UKRAINIAN MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTA

 

Now that we start a new month (where did January go?) it is time to get back to our saints, the real purpose of this Blog.

BL. JOSOPHATA (MICHAELINA) HORDASHEVSKA, another new Ukrainian saint, was born 20 November 1869 in Lviv ( then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire now Ukraine), into a family who were members of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. At the age of 18, she considered consecrating her life to God in a contemplative monastery of the Basilian nuns, then the only Eastern-rite women's religious congregation.

She attended a spiritual retreat which was preached by a Basilian monk, Jeremiah Lomnytskyj, whose spiritual guidance she sought. With his permission, she took a private vow of chastity for one year. She was to renew this vow twice.

Ethnic Ukrainians, living under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were very poor, both materially and spiritually. Women and children were especially neglected. Immorality, illiteracy, superstition, and drunkenness were rampant in the villages.

Father Lomnytsky and co-founder Father Kyrylo Seletsky, pastor of Zhuzheliany, seeing that there was a need for active religious sisters to meet the social needs of the poor and needy faithful of the church, had decided to establish a women's congregation which would follow an active life of service and felt that Michaelina would be an appropriate candidate to found such a congregation.

When she agreed, she was sent in June 1892 to the Polish Roman Catholic Felician Sisters to experience the life of community which followed an active consecrated life.

She returned to Lviv two months later and, on 24 August 1892, took the religious habit of the new congregation, receiving the name Josaphata, in honor of the Ukrainian Catholic martyr Josaphat Kuntsevych (see Blog 10/30/24).

Sister Josaphat then went to Zhuzhelyany, and at the age of 22 became the first Superior of the seven young women who had been recruited for the new institute, training them in the spirit and charism of the Sisters Servants: "Serve your people where the need is greatest".

For the rest of her life, she led the new congregation, through its growth and development. She and her new congregation established daycare centers for children, supplied basic medicines, taught children to read and write, taught the bible and lives of the saints to adults and children, sewed vestments for the clergy, encouraged upkeep of churches, and cared for the sick during cholera and typhus epidemics.

She even sent sisters abroad. In 1902, four sisters were sent to Canada to serve the Ukrainian immigrants. By 1906, the Sisters Servants were in Croatia, and by 1911, they were in Brazil.

By 1902, the congregation numbered 128 sisters, in 26 convents across the country. They were able to hold their first General Chapter in August of that year, at which Bl. Jpsophata was elected the first superior general of the congregation, 

Bl. Josaphata’s life was filled with hardships and sufferings: trials that failed to neither discourage her energetic spirit nor her inner joy and peace. 

Internal divisions led the blessed to tender her resignation to the Metropolitan Archbishop of Lviv. Under the new superior general appointed by the Metropolitan Archbishop, she and her natural sister, Arsenia, were denied permission to take permanent vows. 

Due to her canonical status of still being in temporary vows, Bl. Josophata was ineligible to participate in the next General Chapter of the congregation. Nonetheless, she was elected vicaress general of the congregation in absentia, with the delegates of the chapter petitioning the metropolitan that she be allowed to make her permanent vows. This request was granted, and she did so the following day, 11 May 1909, and assumed the office to which she had been voted.

Bl. Josaphata suffered stoically as her body was ravaged by painful tuberculosis of the bone and she died at the age of 49 on April 7, 1919. Her  remains were transferred in 1982 from the closed and abandoned cemetery in Chervonohrad (formerly Krystynopil), Ukraine to the Generalate of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate in Rome. There, hundreds of people come to pray for the intercession of Blessed Josaphata for their physical and spiritual needs.

According to the testimony of Philomena Yuskiv, "She showed her love for her people through her heart-felt desire to lift them up morally and spiritually; she taught children, youth and women, served the sick, visited the poor and needy, taught liturgical chant and looked after the Church's beauty." Numerous miracles are ascribed due to her intercession after her death.

On 27 June 2001, she was proclaimed Blessed by St. Pope John Paul II in Lviv, in a beatification ceremony during the Holy Liturgy in the Byzantine rite. Over 1 million people attended. Bl.Josaphata speaks to modern people about the beauty of a radical life according to the Gospel and the need for compassion and solidarity with those in need. She shows that even small acts of love can change the world