A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that not even light can get out. Anything that ventures too close will be tugged into its deformation.
War is a black hole. All vestiges of the everyday blessings we so often take for granted are deformed by war’s inexorable gravity. It seems that not even light can get in or out.
The people of Ukraine know this all too well. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Since then, there have been more than half a million battlefield casualties and more than 26,000 civilian casualties. As numbing as these terrible metrics are, they don’t even begin to tell the whole story.
Ukrainian cities have been reduced to rubble. Air raid sirens are the night’s constant refrain.
Mass graves, unspeakable atrocities, a frontline that snakes everywhere—all these conspire to crush the soul, to break the will, to create the perception that the black hole of war pulls so much that no light can be present.
And how do the followers of Christ caught in this awful vortex respond?
Look to the Sisters of the Order of St. Basil the Great who refuse to leave Ukraine. They stand with those caught in the middle of war. They stand, simply and profoundly, as the Lumen Christi, the light of Christ serving as Jesus would.
It turns out that in the black hole of war the light of Christ can still shine.
This order of sisters, which operates in both Ukraine and the United States, is receiving Catholic Extension Society’s 2023-2024 Lumen Christi Award. They were nominated by the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia and were selected among 41 nominees and seven finalists. This award is Catholic Extension Society’s highest honor given to people who radiate and reveal the light of Christ present in the communities where they serve. The Basilian Sisters will be awarded $25,000 to support their ministry among the poor and suffering in Ukraine, and in the U.S., The Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia will also receive $25,000.
Watch the video about the sisters below:
Being the light of Christ
The Basilian sisters have a monastery in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. This is less than 40 miles from the frontline.
When the Russians invaded, Mother Danyila Vynnyk, the provincial superior, sent the youngest members of the community away for fear of what the Russian soldiers would do to them if they broke through Ukraine’s defenses. The safety of the younger sisters was her biggest worry.
The sisters helped with the evacuation of terrified residents. They packed their car with the most vulnerable and took them to the train station where hundreds of refugees sought a way out. Chaos reigned. Many refugees climbed over one another trying to secure a place on the train.
Sister Lucia Murashko, OSMB, is among those who stayed to help evacuate the physically disabled. She said, “You had to have physical strength to put a wheelchair on a train. We did this every day for two to three weeks.”
The sisters decided to track down the elderly in town. They came up with 500 addresses. They visited the elderly, sometimes as often as twice a month, and delivered bags of supplies, food, drinking water and cooking gas from Basilian monasteries in Italy.
Catholic Extension Society also helped fund these essential goods in partnership with the Ukrainian Catholic churches here in the United States. We have supported these U.S. churches for nearly half a century.
Soon the sisters’ monastery in Zaporizhzhia also became a shelter to welcome people fleeing from the occupied territories and to house women and children whose husbands had been conscripted into military service.
The sisters also went to villages no more than a mile from the frontline. They took drinking water to the soldiers because the wells were contaminated. Once, when they were unable to come for two weeks in a row, soldiers at the checkpoints asked where they had been. The sisters were sorely missed.
The soldiers from the battlefields came to the monastery too. Many of them had not washed for months. They loved the clean T-shirts, trousers and socks the sisters offered.
They were starved for a home-cooked meal served on a real plate with a real fork and spoon. The sweets and real coffee added to the perfection of the meal. Many of the soldiers went to confession to the local parish priest.
What touched the sisters the most was when the soldiers prayed for them. When Sister Lucia heard the soldiers prayerfully pleading for them to continue visiting them on the frontline, she felt as if it were the voice of Jesus speaking directly to her, saying, “Feed my sheep.” The soldiers’ gratitude fuels the sisters’ ongoing ministry.
The sisters don’t consider themselves heroic, brave or even exceptional. They say that if we were in Ukraine we would do the same. Sister Lucia insists that if we would see the horrors they see every day and receive the gratitude of those in need, then we would want to do more. She insists that they are merely the hands of the people with good hearts enabling their charity.
Sister Lucia, whose name poetically and appropriately means “light,” said, “The source of our light is Him. It’s Jesus, you know, and He just works. You just have to follow Him. He does all the things that are needed. It is He who works. Jesus inspires us, and we just do what we can.”
The Basilian sisters choose to stand in the black hole that is war and let Christ’s light shine through them. They, like Jesus, are willing to make sacrifices, up to and including their own lives if need be.
Ministering in the United States
As a religious order with a charism to serve the poor, these Ukrainian sisters go wherever people are in desperate need to see the light of Christ. This also includes here in the United States.
The Basilian sisters have been in Philadelphia for more than a century, having established a community in 1911 at the invitation of the Ukrainian Catholic bishop in the United States. In the fourth century, St. Basil established houses for the poor, the ill and the itinerant. Today, Basilian sisters actively minister throughout Europe, South America and the United States. The power of their charism continues today.
Previously, their charge was to care for children and orphans as millions of Ukrainians immigrated to the United States. The latest iteration of their century-long ministry is to support refugee families coming from Ukraine. And it is an immense blessing to these refugees that these sisters happen to share their Ukrainian culture and language.
Hundreds of families have come into the orbit of the St. Basil Support Ministry located just outside Philadelphia at the Basilian Motherhouse in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.
The motherhouse is home to more than 20 retired sisters, like Sister Olga Marie Faryna, below, who help out the ministry and comfort refugees.
St. Basil would have been so proud of the repurposing of this motherhouse as an outpost of mercy.
Sister Teodora is a member of the Jesus, Lover of Humanity Province. She lives up to that wonderful name. Her fellow Sister Monica Lesnik does too.
Sister Monica (below, left) helps pick up food donations Mondays through Thursdays, so Sister Teodora can distribute them on Fridays.
Food is not the only precious commodity distributed at the St. Basil Support Ministry. Donations of clothing, furniture, diapers and hygiene products come in as well.
If Sister Monica hears of a donation of a hundred gallons of milk an hour away, then off to get the milk she goes.
Shelter is also precious. Ukrainian refugees are precariously housed. One family was evicted on a Sunday afternoon. They called Sister Teodora at 4 p.m., and she got on social media and found them a place to stay before nightfall.
The suffering in Sister Teodora’s homeland breaks her heart. She said that 75 percent of the people who come to the St. Basil Support Ministry have had a friend or loved one perish in the war. This shared loss creates a powerful and activist empathy.
The Ukrainians in and around Philadelphia will move heaven and earth to help each other. It is no surprise that refugees make the most reliable volunteers.
Take Diana Kaday (below, center). She is 24.
She was finishing her master’s degree in accounting when the invasion began. She went to Germany for eight months before moving to Pennsylvania. Her mother is still in Germany, and her father is still in Ukraine. When Diana arrived here, she had nothing.
Sister Teodora helped Diana get furnishings for her studio apartment. The sisters were a connection to her Ukrainian home and a path forward. Diana wanted to help other people like her.
This is the genius of Sister Teodora and the St. Basil Support Ministry. She empowered Diana to care for the recently arrived refugees. No one could do it better.
As Diana said,
“You understand their situation, because you came with the same reason. So, you do what you can do.”
Sister Teodora started the St. Basil Support Ministry with 25 families. Now more than 500 are registered. When asked, the vast majority of these refugees will say they intend to return to Ukraine when the war is over. They have no idea what they will find, but they will find a way.
Sister Teodora does not doubt their resolve. The Ukrainian people, she said, will not be broken.
Bringing light to the streets
As if her work with Ukrainian refugees isn’t enough, Sister Teodora also partners with Sister Monica to reach another group of people caught in another proverbial black hole: drug addicts living on the streets of the Kensington neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia.
Kensington is the center of the city’s opioid crisis. It is a different type of battlefield in a different type of war, but the carnage is no less real.
The mass of bodies strewn across the sidewalk is hard to accept as a scene that exists in the United States. Spent syringes litter the ground.
Men and women are slumped over, groaning, unbalanced and emaciated. They are covered with tattered blankets or cardboard boxes. They are like the walking dead, at the center of one of the most profound problems facing America today.
This could be a scene of the apocalypse, or one of the seven circles of hell, if it were not for the fact that these people are our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers.
Sister Teodora understands all of this. She is a Lumen Christi. Christ’s light helps her see through to the heart of things.
Against the advice of many who told her that Kensington was too dangerous, she goes there weekly. She goes even in these darkest shadows of our society, knowing Christ’s light must shine. She pulls up in her minivan next to the huddled masses and distributes food, clothing, comfort and TLC to the suffering, the addicted and the abandoned.
Sister Monica ventures into these frightful streets as well, stepping over garbage and needles to give out food.
While Sister Teodora has no illusions that she can deliver these people from their addiction, she can at least affirm their human dignity. “It’s their gratefulness,” she said. “All my blessings are here. They just say, ‘Sister, God bless you. What are you doing coming here, that you are helping us?'”
Sister Joann Sosler, OSBM, Provincial Superior of the Jesus, Lover of Humanity Province of sisters based in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, said of the Lumen Christi Award, “This tremendous gift recognizes our Sisters’ ministry to Ukrainian war victims who have been displaced in both Europe and the United States. It is a sign from God that our work is important and must continue. But it is also meaningful for the wider Ukrainian Catholic Church and Ukrainians worldwide.”
Just like all the Sisters of the Order of St. Basil the Great have done for centuries and will do going forward, they are Lumen Christi.
These sisters illuminate the places where not even the light is supposed to enter, just as Jesus would have us do.
These heroes need help, too. Catholic Extension Society supports them as part of our mission: to work in solidarity with people to build up vibrant and transformative Catholic faith communities among the poor in the poorest regions of America.
