ROME, Italy — Ukrainian Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk declared Wednesday that “no one doubts that Ukraine will win” the war against Russia.
“I invite all of you to pray for Ukraine’s victory,” Archbishop Shevchuk said in his video message to his compatriots. “A prayer of thanks goes to the Lord God and to our Ukrainian army because we are alive this morning and we can stand in prayer before the face of God and serve our people and our homeland.”
The archbishop is convinced that Ukraine will eventually win the war and pivoted attention instead to forging the future of the nation.
“Indeed, we see that no one doubts that Ukraine will win,” he stated. “But how do we want to see the Ukraine of tomorrow? In fact, we have all changed. Which homeland, which state do we want to build together?”
In his vision of the future Ukraine, Shevchuk underscored the importance of human rights, especially the right to life.
“The sacredness of human life, from natural conception to natural death, is the basis, the foundation for analyzing whether the legislation of a particular country is just or not,” he said, and whether “society is worthy of the people who live there.”
Indeed, the first condition for successful state formation is “respect for the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life,” the archbishop affirmed, a principle that underlies “every social and state construction.”
Nobody has the right “to take away from a person the dignity given to him by the Creator,” he asserted. “All social and state institutions must also respect this dignity and guarantee the rights that derive from this dignity.”
“Man is not for the state, but the state is for man,” he continued. “The state, the society are the spaces in which a person should have the opportunity to develop and realize all the gifts and talents given by God.”
“Sometimes, during the war, we feel a kind of devaluation of human life,” he reflected. “Sometimes, our conscience is clouded when we hear about dozens of dead, hundreds of injured.”
“But every person killed is a tragedy. And it is the failure of humanity,” he declared.
Therefore, knowing how to respect human life and the dignity of every person “represents the cornerstone of the construction of any just and dignified person or state,” he said.