Chris Herlinger is a US correspondent who's witnessed many countries at their most disastrous moments. Staying in touch with his friends in Europe, he never expected the continent to plunge into a situation he usually reported on — war.
"I've covered humanitarian crises in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. All of them share similarities — people in shock, experiencing trauma, and unsure what life holds in store for them," says Chris. "People need to make sense of what is happening to them because sense-making is so important to humans. So, I found this among the refugees and displaced in Ukraine and Poland."
Poland is where everything began to plot for Chris.
As an American journalist with the National Catholic Reporter's Global Sisters Report, Chris had most of his contacts there with church-related people. And churches exclusively, in both Ukraine and Poland, were the first to experience the initial wave of Ukrainian refugees, opening their gates to all. At first, Chris met with Ukrainian refugees in Polish temples.
"Sisters and clergy are perhaps better equipped psychologically and spiritually to crises immediately. Aside from that, churches are tied to humanitarian networks that can respond quickly. For example, Catholic churches and the global Caritas network responded robustly in Ukraine," Chris explains.
This war has profoundly reshaped the religious landscape of Ukraine, making Orthodox Ukrainians feel more at home in the Catholic Church than in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate which used to be the largest in the country. Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, huge amounts of Ukrainians have transitioned to the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, leading to shifts in the jurisdiction of many temples and establishing it as the largest Orthodox denomination today.
Yet, this consideration of faith would come to life later, of a more organic nature once people had time to reflect after the greatest shock of their lives.
The Ukrainian church workers who took care of dozens of people were forced to put aside their fear which they also suffered. This acknowledgment was shared with Chris when he arrived in Ukraine. "We are afraid, but we are also strong," said one of Chris's interviewees from the church.
After speaking with hundreds of people during the war and about its impact, Chris wrote a book titled Solidarity and Mercy, which now may serve as a guide to the events as they unfolded. Although it consists of people's life stories and reflections, they would not fall into their right place without the historical context.
This mirrored my own experience — the more I reported, the more I realized how deeply historical forces were at work in people's lives. That's true of people everywhere but I've never experienced that so deeply felt as in Ukraine — or among Ukrainian-Americans here in the US.
At the same time, a new history was forming right before his eyes, based on grief, mercy, and resistance.
Traveling through the Ukrainian darkness during one of the regular blackouts in search of candles with the local Catholic sisters, Chris gained a new appreciation of life — which was the only thing radiating in the darkness. In his book, he will gather all signs of the Ukrainians' strength — be it a simple prayer for all the suffering or a challenging personal delivery of basic goods to civilians from the pre-front cities — under the central word being resistance.
"Ukrainians always, ALWAYS, spoke of Ukrainian resistance, the need to win the war and defeat the Russian forces. Ukrainian resolve is something to behold!" Chris said.
The God-given strength is what many rely on during wars, and Chris was lucky enough to meet those who showed him what it embodies in Ukraine.
"When we do hear the alarms, we will pray but just continue what we're doing," Sr. Sarah said. "This became a necessary way of coping with the situation. Otherwise," she said, "you just become overcome with fear and tension," — a citing from Chris's book.
Chris has gained his own sense-making experience while traveling throughout Ukraine, from the smallest villages such as Velykomykhailivka in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast to Zaporizhzhia and Kyiv, forcing him to acknowledge the change people underwent and the reasons they stay in Ukraine. This also includes non-Ukrainians like Lidya, 56, a Slovakian sister and member of the Dominican Sisters of Blessed Imelda.
"I've been here so long, my heart is here," she said. "The Slovak Republic is my native land, but here, well, I can't give up," Chris cites Lidya in his book.
After a while, Chris started to feel this way too, desiring to come back to Ukraine once more:
"I hope to return. I love Ukraine and Ukrainians. Even if the war ended tomorrow, there would be much to report on — how this tragic and unnecessary invasion has affected and disrupted people's lives. I was impressed with people's resolve and love of the country."
Even though Chris says he used almost all notes he made on Ukraine in his book and told nearly everything planned, there's no end to reporting on Ukrainians. Thus, he continues his exploration of the Ukrainian soul, wounded, yet unbroken.
Recently, Chris talked to Sister Lucia, of the Order of St. Basil the Great, who's been assisting the Ukrainians in Zaporizhzhia affected by the war. What she said to him gives not only hope but a good note to this story, "We're all tired of the war, and our first wish is that we want to have peace. However, it doesn't mean we must give up."
Also, Chris exclusively provides us with an excerpt from his book:
"In two years of travel to central and eastern Europe, I saw some of the best and worst in humanity — and some of the worst had little to do directly with the Ukrainian war. Personal visits to Holocaust memorial sites in Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Croatia could not help but reinforce a certain pessimism about the human condition. And yet, a simple statement by Holocaust survivor Halina Birenbaum, which I saw during my second visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, crystallized what I had seen and experienced in Ukraine. "Even if evil triumphs at times," Birenbaum said, "goodness does not cease to exist."
I saw plenty of examples of this — on the Ukrainian-Polish border; in convents in Ukraine, Poland, Croatia, and the United States; in the towns outside of Kyiv and in villages near Zaporizhzhia in eastern Ukraine. But we should always be a bit cautious about the word "goodness" — it can prevail, as the Gospels suggest, but it is also often hard-earned, something that Beatitude Sviatoslav from Ukraine in his March 2024 sermon at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City noted."
