ROME — Ukrainian Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk has decried Russia’s launching of their dead soldiers as weapons against the Ukrainian army.
The Russians “are literally throwing the bodies of their dead at the positions of the Ukrainian army,” Archbishop Shevchuk notes with disgust in a video message Wednesday, and it appears that “the main instrument of their attack is the bodies of their slain.”
“A terrible tragedy is unfolding before our eyes, which many already compare with Berlin in 1945,” Shevchuk states, namely “throwing the bodies of your own soldiers into the positions of the one you are competing with.”
“There is blood, crying, and weeping today in the Ukrainian Donbas,” he adds, and it is “our task to say ‘no’ to such cruel and blind nonsense” and to “defend human life and human dignity.”
In his message, the archbishop also observes that in the Julian liturgical calendar followed by many in Ukraine, Wednesday marks the feast of the massacre of the Holy Innocents, the young children killed by King Herod in an effort to eliminate the newborn Jesus.
Dead bodies of Russian soldiers lay on the field as they are collected by volunteers nearby Izyum in Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine on December 06, 2022. (Photo by Narciso Contreras/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“Reflecting on this event, on this crime, on this martyrdom of innocent children in the light of the great feast of Christian hope, Christmas, we somehow see the meaning of these events of two thousand years ago through the prism of the events of the murder of innocent children today in Ukraine,” he declares.
“Why is the blood of innocent children flowing? Once in Bethlehem long ago, today in Ukraine,” Shevchuk continues. “We ask the Lord God again about this today.”
Today, “all of Ukraine is the weeping Bethlehem that cries for its murdered children,” he declares.
The dead bodies of two Russian soldiers lie on the grass in front of a house in the recently liberated village of Makiivka in Donbas. A cardboard box with the letter “Z”, a symbol of the Russian army, is placed in front of one of the bodies. (Laurel Chor/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Our mothers “are in despair today during the Christmas holiday,” he states, because they “seem to feel that they have lost all hope.”
Our hope is in the newborn Son of God who “became a small, defenseless, and suffering child,” he states, who alone can “wipe away tears with His strength and grace.”
“O God, bless our girls and boys at the front. Give them the strength to restrain the murderous hand of the modern 21st-century Herod,” he concludes. “O God, bless Ukraine with Your just, heavenly peace!”
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