On ground in Eastern Europe, U.S. Catholics aid Ukraine on various fronts

LVIV, Ukraine — Nelson Mejia said he was stressed watching news reports from his home in New Jersey at the start of the distant war in Ukraine, as Russia escalated attacks against the smaller neighboring nation in February, pulling both countries into the center of a global conflict.

“I couldn’t sleep, I had nightmares,” Mejia, a Catholic active in solidarity work in New Jersey, said in an August interview in Poland with Catholic News Service.

“I started praying, and I asked God to put an answer in my heart,” Mejia recalled in Przemysl, a Polish border city less than 10 miles from Ukraine.

Until September, Mejia was part of a mass of volunteers at a small train station in the border town that has become a major hub of the humanitarian effort helping the displaced.

With economic aid, political support, and boots on the ground inside Ukraine and Poland, U.S. Catholics like Mejia have been steady partners helping Ukrainians under attack.

Mejia said a process of prayer and discernment led to him quit his job as a chef and go to the other side of world, to Poland and eventually inside Ukraine, from April to October 2022.

Via the Catholic humanitarian organization Caritas, he began helping refugees from the war-torn nation in places such as the Przemysl train station. He went back just before Christmas to Poland and has set up a GoFundMe page to help with the effort.

Marisa Porto, a Catholic from Virginia, said she, too, felt the need to reach out and help Ukrainians, but for more personal reasons.

Since 2009, when she was a newspaper publisher and editor, she has traveled to Ukraine, including to places now under attack, as part of a media exchange program.

“I didn’t realize when I went how connected I would get to the people and the country — and the mission,” she said.

As a journalist, that mission includes helping find ways to keep media alive and help it flourish, said Porto, who in January will start a new mission as holder of the Knight Chair in Local News and Sustainability at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

During the latest Russian invasion, she continually checked in with friends and colleagues she had met on her many trips to places such as Crimea, now under Russian control.

And though she donated to various efforts, in August she decided to return to visit and research what media companies — and their journalists — were doing to stay alive during strife. That included sitting calmly through blaring air sirens as she conducted her research in places such as Lviv and Chernivtsi in western Ukraine.

“The focus has been to help emerging democracies develop their news organizations,” she told CNS.

Beyond being physically present, like Mejia and Porto, the Catholic Church as an organization has taken up major collection efforts to help.

Since Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, via the Subcommittee on Aid to the Church in Central and Eastern Europe, has allocated $1.75 million for basic humanitarian needs targeted to Ukrainians, said Jennifer Healy, associate director for the Office of National Collections at the USCCB headquarters in Washington.

At the USCCB’s fall general assembly in mid-November, Archbishop Borys Gudziak of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia thanked the U.S. bishops and their leadership for spearheading U.S. Catholic economic and spiritual support.

“I want to thank you for praying, for staying informed, advocating and for helping,” he said. “Catholics in Ukraine have been explaining Catholic social doctrine: unalienable God-given human dignity, solidarity, subsidiary, the common good.”

Healy, of National Collections, said that following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February, the office received a wave of urgent requests for help from bishops, priests, and religious women and men in Ukraine helping with the humanitarian work.

“They needed immediate funding for food and medicine, blankets and pillows, and other basic necessities to those who were fleeing the war-torn areas in the east and in the south of the country,” she told CNS.

“As the conflict continued and it became apparent that there would not be a quick end to the fighting,” she said, “the Catholic Church leaders began more renovations of temporary shelters and we received requests for funding washing machines and dishwashers, kitchen and bathroom renovations, cars and vans for transporting humanitarian aid further east, and diesel generators for backup energy sources.”

“Those requests have continued, especially now that Ukraine is suffering such a severe energy crisis and winter has set in,” Healy added.

But the church is set to help long into the future and beyond the present tragedy, she said.

“An additional $8 million (approximately) has been raised for the eventual rebuilding, when peace returns,” she told CNS.

Editor’s note: To help with Nelson Mejia’s humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, visit www.gofundme.com/f/hope-at-christmas-volunteer-with-refugee. Information about the USCCB’s Office of National Collections can be found at www.usccb.org/committees/national-collections.