When millions of Ukrainians fled their homeland in the winter of 2022 ahead of invading Russian tanks, the world watched to see how they would be treated as nearby countries responded to the crush of humanity at their doorsteps.
A telling, hopeful sign emerged in Krakow. It came from inside a packed Greek Catholic church where Ukrainians and Poles prayed and sang side-by-side soon after the invasion.
Among them was Chris Herlinger, a humanitarian journalist from New York City and author of Solidarity and Mercy: The Power of Christian Humanitarian Efforts in Ukraine (Morehouse Publishing, October 2024). He was in Krakow on assignment for Global Sisters Report, covering how Roman Catholic nuns were mobilizing to meet a raft of urgent needs.
“The church was filled from end to end with people, recent arrivals,” said Herlinger, a seminary-trained Episcopal layman and member of St. Bartholomew’s Church in midtown Manhattan, in an interview with The Living Church. “People looked shell-shocked. They were crying. But they had clearly found comfort in this very sacred, very beautiful setting.”
Now as the war grinds past its three-year anniversary in February, what had been a warm spirit of hospitality has grown notably chillier toward Ukrainian refugees, who number about 6.7 million across Europe and beyond. Another 3.7 million remain internally displaced persons (IDPs) inside Ukraine, meaning they fled their homes but not their country and haven’t returned to where they once lived.
Episcopal Relief & Development (ERD) warned in June 2024 that “the incredible public support and resources have waned and anti-immigrant sentiment is picking up steam.” ERD’s partners in Europe, including the Act Alliance that consists of about 150 religious organizations, are shaping their programming to address such emerging challenges.
“Given the prolonged conflict, the [Act Alliance] program works to strengthen the resilience of host communities and build social cohesion with IDPs and crisis-affected populations,” said Lura Steele, ERD program officer, via email.
Act Alliance provides food, shelter, public health, psycho-social care, and necessary non-food items to over 400,000 internally displaced persons and refugees. But funding is growing harder to come by. Act Alliance received $23 million in donations for Ukraine relief in 2022, according to an email from the alliance’s humanitarian team. But as of November, it had brought in only $3 million for 2024.
The work aims to support vulnerable populations whose problems are increasingly long term. They’re coping with chronic unemployment, for example, and insidious effects of trauma and divorce from husbands who were required to stay and fight in Ukraine. Due to Ukraine’s conscription rules, many who fled have not seen their male siblings, cousins, fathers, or adult sons in years.
“The faces of the refugees who were going throughout Europe, but particularly to Poland, were basically women and children,” Herlinger said. As he has witnessed elsewhere in covering humanitarian crises, “Women do most of the family work. So when their families are faced with a crisis, the burden is usually on them and not the men so much.”
ERD’s support includes coaching and technical assistance for staff and volunteers, Steele said. ERD also works with the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, which provides Ukrainian refugee assistance through church-affiliated organizations across the continent.
As refugees and host communities manage mounting strains and thinning patience, observers say what’s needed is to rekindle and sustain the type of solidarity that was evident when refugees first arrived. Herlinger’s book might help point the way. He reports on what has fed the souls of Christians who remain beacons of hope in the trenches, despite harsh conditions and bleak prospects.
In chronicling Catholic sisters’ work among Ukrainians over three years, he found the all-important quality of solidarity to be irrepressible among women who feel called to be present and supportive wherever suffering persists, whether chronic or acute.
What refugees experienced among Christian humanitarians, Herlinger writes, “was a combination of solidarity — of finding unity in a common experience of displacement amid war — and mercy — finding compassion rooted in the gospel mandate to comfort the afflicted, feed the hungry, offer shelter to those who have lost their homes.”
Herlinger, who has a master’s degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York, has spent decades covering religion and humanitarian relief campaigns. Working for multiple news outlets over the years, he has reported from such global hotspots as Afghanistan, Darfur, Ethiopia, Haiti, Pakistan, and South Sudan.
In the Ukrainian diaspora, today’s urgent call for cohesion between locals and the displaced is not solely religious. Other groups recognize it as a crucial, albeit delicate, dynamic for stability in the region. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has spent the past year stressing that solidarity must be a priority.
“I have seen first-hand the suffering and devastation of the war,” wrote Philippe Leclerc, UNHCR’s regional refugee coordinator for the Ukraine situation, in an early 2024 report on Ukrainian refugees. “But I have also witnessed the extraordinary generosity displayed by host families, communities, cities, municipalities and countries across the region. This solidarity must be sustained as the situation enters its third year and as refugees’ — and host communities’ — resources are increasingly under strain.”
The scale of the challenge remains massive. According to UNHCR’s 2024 report on refugees in eastern Europe, the region was bracing for an expected one-year, 10-percent surge in refugee numbers. Germany has already absorbed an estimated 1.2 million, Poland upward of 900,000, and smaller countries have significant numbers as well.
“Host communities face increasing costs of living, additional burdens on services, and other socioeconomic challenges, including limited housing,” the UNHCR 2024 report said. “There are locations displaying increasing examples of this welcome turning into fatigue.”
Most refugees still want to return to Ukraine, but most also acknowledge that will not happen this year or anytime soon. That’s according to a July-August 2024 UNHCR survey of more than 11,000 Ukrainian refugees, IDPs, and former refugees who had gone back to Ukraine. They find various hurdles too daunting to tackle: homes damaged to the point of being unlivable, occupying Russian forces, unreliable electricity due to Russian attacks on infrastructure, and a lack of adequate job prospects.
For now and the foreseeable future, it appears that refugees and host communities need to keep living side by side, sharing access to resources and mustering compassion for each other’s situations. In many settings, Christian humanitarians offer a model that’s respected.
“The sisters are rooted in communities [in and near Ukraine], and people know them,” Herlinger said.
In one Polish town, for instance, he recalled how a group of Dominican sisters had long worked with local schoolchildren before the war. So when refugees showed up and residents wondered how to respond, they regarded the compassionate and welcoming sisters as role models.
The sisters “were recognized as leaders in the community,” Herlinger said.
Where Christian humanitarians are fostering solidarity among refugees and locals, spirituality plays a key role. In Solidarity and Mercy, Herlinger tells how he was brought to tears while interviewing Tetiana Stawnychy, president of Caritas Ukraine. She reflected on what keeps Christian humanitarians returning to dire and dangerous situations to provide IDPs with basic supplies and other types of support.
“This act of helping another person is a restorative act in itself — it’s restoring something in the person that’s being helped and it’s restoring something in the person that’s helping,” she told him. “It’s like a restoration of a sense of this human face of human dignity of love and kindness and mercy. That’s such a key part of who we are and how we’re made.”
Herlinger finds Christian humanitarians to be intentional about affirming human dignity wherever hope is running low. Among refugees, it can entail gestures as simple as delivering cleaning supplies, or as extensive as sheltering mothers and children at the convent for a few days or weeks at a time.
And it’s not just refugees whose dignity is honored. One soldier, who had been a Russian target on Ukraine’s front lines, was served Holy Communion inside a boarded-up triage center. It did not matter that he was the only one who attended the half-hour Mass, celebrated by a priest who drove for an hour from Zaporizhzhia.
“It can be just one,” said Sr. Lucia Murashko, who assisted with the service, as she talked with Herlinger on the long, desolate drive back to Zaporizhzhia. “God hears our prayers there even when medical staff or soldiers do not always understand the value of our prayers.”
Herlinger plans to keep writing about what he’s finding in Ukraine. He would like to write another book about how the Orthodox Christian faith of Ukrainian soldiers sustains their multi-year resistance, he told TLC.
In the meantime, he’s keen to keep bringing attention to what he calls “the feminine face of this effort” among Ukrainian refugees.
“We just live in a really bad moment in the world,” Herlinger said. “In our own country, we’ve just seen this corrosion of kindness and civility. I just think we need more displays of kindness in the world — kindness, solidarity, and mercy.”
G. Jeffrey MacDonald is an award-winning religion reporter, United Church of Christ pastor, church consultant and author of Part-Time is Plenty: Thriving without Full-Time Clergy (WJK Press, 2020). His website is gjeffreymacdonald.com.
