Let's write about the Ukraine

The Ukrainian Fight to Exist- this essay has been reprinted in multiple American newspapers. 

This essay was published in the Florida newspaper the Orlando Sentinel and other newspapers.  Ukrainians in Florida say they will continue to protest.

The stakes are high, but Ukrainians refuse to back down.

For almost a year, the world has witnessed a devastating struggle between Ukrainians and Russian invaders who continue their attacks on Ukrainian territory.

The death toll is rising. The senseless destruction of cities and towns continues, yet Ukrainians fight onward. This is because the threat is not just about a border dispute or politics. There is a deeper cultural conflict at play, one that puts the very existence of the Ukrainian people at risk.

To understand what a loss for Ukraine would mean, it’s important to understand the history and people of this unique land.

Who are Ukrainians?  Ukrainians inhabit the second-largest country in Europe. Home to over 43 million, Ukraine is rich and vibrant with an ancient past and promising future, should it prevail against Russia. Many aspects of Ukrainian culture are folk-based, stemming from the ancient Slavic lore, traditions, and beliefs of Kyivan Rus, an empire that is the cultural ancestor of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Other aspects of Ukrainian culture are heavily influenced by their Christian faith.

Ukraine’s closeness to both western Europe and Russia has resulted in a blend of cultures. The bandura, for example, is a musical instrument that is popular in both Poland and Ukraine. Ukrainian cuisine also inspires many recipes throughout the rest of Europe such as borscht (or beet soup), Ukrainian mushroom soup, and banosh, a corn porridge popular amongst Ukrainians that live near or in the mountains. Many aspects of Ukrainian culture are folk-based, stemming from the ancient Slavic lore, traditions, and beliefs of Kyivan Rus, an empire that is the cultural ancestor of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Other aspects of Ukrainian culture are heavily influenced by their Christian faith.

Unprovoked Russian aggression has targeted the innocent Ukrainian civilian population.

Ukraine’s closeness to both western Europe and Russia has resulted in a blend of cultures. The bandura, for example, is a musical instrument that is popular in both Poland and Ukraine. Ukrainian cuisine also inspires many recipes throughout the rest of Europe such as borscht (or beet soup), Ukrainian mushroom soup, and banosh, a corn porridge popular amongst Ukrainians that live near or in the mountains.

No such thing as “Little Russia”:  Despite Ukraine’s size and influence, much of the western world remains largely unaware of the battle Ukrainians are facing to keep their customs, language, and history alive. 

Russian President Vladmir Putin does not see Ukrainians as independent people. 

Referring to them as “little Russians,” Putin has tried to erase Ukraine’s national identity by:

• Viewing Ukraine as Russian territory
• Asserting that the Ukrainian language is merely a dialect of Russian
• Generally enforcing the concept that Russian and Ukrainian people are one and the same

Although some Ukrainians indeed have dual heritage and have adopted a Russian cultural identity, most resist the view that Ukraine is a lesser Russia.

The fight to be Ukrainian: Imagine living in your own country and not being allowed to speak your native tongue in public or being taught another country’s history in school as though it was your own. This is what Ukraine has faced for generations. But it hasn’t just been about erasing a culture. Ukrainians have known torture, despair, and suffering long before the invasion last February. Ukrainians endured mass starvation, forced assimilation and dangerous propaganda that turned families against each other during Stalin’s reign of terror in 1932 and 1933. Russia has consistently attacked residential areas of Ukraine, specifically targeting schools, hospitals and apartment buildings. In Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine today, civilians are being attacked, tortured, and even executed by pro-Russian insurgents and the Russian military.

Should Russia succeed in this war, the end result will be an end to Ukraine. They will be forced to once again give up their way of life and be ruled by Russia. In our modern world, it is sometimes hard to understand how something like this could still be going on. How many more Ukrainian families will be separated, innocents tortured, and lives lost?

Americans and Ukrainians have a shared cause: Freedom — the freedom to speak your language, practice your religion, celebrate your culture, and live in peace — is something precious we all value. Sometimes it takes an unspeakable tragedy to remind us just how precious our freedoms really are. Ukrainians, like Americans, are proud of their families, country, and way of life. They will do anything to defend it.

Though they may seem a world away, ask yourself: are we so very different from Ukrainians who continue to fight for their families, country, and way of life? Wouldn’t we want those beyond our borders, maybe even half a world away, to stand with us and remind us we are not alone in the fight? The war may seem like it has gone on forever and that we are in a hopeless situation, but there is something you can do. Every voice that is raised on social media is a voice heard for freedom. 

Please share this article and help call for an end to the unprovoked Russian occupation.

Let's write about the Holocaust victim Saint Edith Stein

 On Holocaust Memorial Remembrance Day, January 27th,  let's write about Saint Edith Stein. 

"I never knew that people could be like this, neither did I know that my brothers and sisters would have to suffer like this." Saint Edith Stein (Edith Stein, original name of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross or, in Latin, Sancta Teresia Benedicta a Cruce, (born October 12, 1891, Breslau, Germany [now Wrocław, Poland]—died August 9/10, 1942, Auschwitz concentration camp; canonized October 11, 1998; feast day August 9), Roman Catholic convert from Judaism "We bow down before the testimony of the life and death of Edith Stein, an outstanding daughter of Israel and at the same time a daughter of the Carmelite Order, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a personality who united within her rich life a dramatic synthesis of our century. It was the synthesis of a history full of deep wounds that are still hurting ... and also the synthesis of the full truth about man. All this came together in a single heart that remained restless and unfulfilled until it finally found rest in God."

These were the words of Pope John Paul II, when he beatified Edith Stein in Cologne on 1 May 1987.

Who was this woman- convert and Holocaust victim?

c
Edith Stein was born in Breslau on 12 October 1891, the youngest of 11, as her family were celebrating Yom Kippur, that most important Jewish festival, the Feast of Atonement. 

"More than anything else, this helped make the youngest child very precious to her mother." Being born on this day was like a foreshadowing to Edith, a future Carmelite nun.

Edith's father, who ran a timber business, died when she had only just turned two. Her mother, a very devout, hard-working, strong-willed and truly wonderful woman, now had to fend for herself and to look after the family and their large business. However, she did not succeed in keeping up a living faith in her children. Edith lost her faith in God. "I consciously decided, of my own volition, to give up praying," she said.

In 1911, she passed her school-leaving exam with flying colors and enrolled at the University of Breslau  (Poland) to study German and history, though this was a mere "bread-and-butter" choice. Her real interest was in philosophy and in women's issues. She became a member of the Prussian Society for Women's Franchise. 

"When I was at school and during my first years at university," she wrote later, "I was a radical suffragette. Then I lost interest in the whole issue. Now I am looking for purely pragmatic solutions."

In 1913, Edith Stein transferred to Gottingen University, to study under the mentorship of Edmund Husserl. She became his pupil and teaching assistant, and he later tutored her for a doctorate. 

At the time, anyone who was interested in philosophy was fascinated by Husserl's new view of reality, whereby the world as we perceive it does not merely exist in a Kantian (i.e., Kant moral philosophy)way, in our subjective perception. His pupils saw his philosophy as a return to objects: "back to things". 

Husserl's phenomenology unwittingly led many of his pupils to the Christian faith. In Gottingen, Edith Stein also met the philosopher Max Scheler, who directed her attention to Roman Catholicism. Nevertheless, she did not neglect her "bread-and-butter" studies and passed her degree with distinction in January 1915, though she did not follow it up with teacher training.

"I no longer have a life of my own," she wrote at the beginning of the First World War, having done a nursing course and gone to serve in an Austrian field hospital. This was a hard time for her, during which she looked after the sick in the typhus ward, worked in an operating theatre, and saw young people die. When the hospital was dissolved, in 1916, she followed Husserl as his assistant to the German city of Freiburg, where she passed her doctorate summa cum laude (with the utmost distinction) in 1917, after writing a thesis on "The Problem of Empathy."

During this period she went to Frankfurt Cathedral and saw a woman with a shopping basket going in to kneel for a brief prayer. "This was something totally new to me. In the synagogues and Protestant churches I had visited people simply went to the services. Here, however, I saw someone coming straight from the busy marketplace into this empty church, as if she was going to have an intimate conversation. It was something I never forgot. "Towards the end of her dissertation she wrote: "There have been people who believed that a sudden change had occurred within them and that this was a result of God's grace." How could she come to such a conclusion?
Edith Stein had been good friends with Husserl's Göttingen assistant, Adolf Reinach, and his wife.

When Reinach fell in Flanders in November 1917, Edith went to Göttingen to visit his widow. The Reinachs had converted to Protestantism. Edith felt uneasy about meeting the young widow at first, but was surprised when she actually met with a woman of faith. "This was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it ... it was the moment when my unbelief collapsed and Christ began to shine his light on me - Christ in the mystery of the Cross."

Later, she wrote: "Things were in God's plan which I had not planned at all. I am coming to the living faith and conviction that - from God's point of view - there is no chance and that the whole of my life, down to every detail, has been mapped out in God's divine providence and makes complete and perfect sense in God's all-seeing eyes."

In Autumn 1918, Edith Stein gave up her job as Husserl's teaching assistant. She wanted to work independently. It was not until 1930 that she saw Husserl again after her conversion, and she shared with him about her faith, as she would have liked him to become a Christian, too. Then she wrote down the amazing words: "Every time I feel my powerlessness and inability to influence people directly, I become more keenly aware of the necessity of my own holocaust."

Edith Stein wanted to obtain a professorship, a goal that was impossible for a woman at the time. Husserl wrote the following reference: "Should academic careers be opened up to ladies, then I can recommend her whole-heartedly and as my first choice for admission to a professorship." Later, she was refused a professorship on account of her Jewishness.

Back in Breslau, Edith Stein began to write articles about the philosophical foundation of psychology. However, she also read the New Testament, Kierkegaard and Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. She felt that one could not just read a book like that, but had to put it into practice.

In the summer of 1921. she spent several weeks in Bergzabern (in the Palatinate) on the country estate of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, another pupil of Husserl's. Hedwig had converted to Protestantism with her husband. One evening Edith picked up an autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and read this book all night. "When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth." Later, looking back on her life, she wrote: "My longing for truth was a single prayer."

On 1, January 1922, Edith Stein w,as baptized. It was the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus, when Jesus entered into the covenant of Abraham. Edith Stein stood by the baptismal font, wearing Hedwig Conrad-Martius' white wedding cloak. Hedwig washer godmother. "I had given up practising my Jewish religion when I was a 14-year-old girl and did not begin to feel Jewish again until I had returned to God." From this moment on she was continually aware that she belonged to Christ not only spiritually, but also through her blood. At the Feast of the Purification of Mary - another day with an Old Testament reference - she was confirmed by the Bishop of Speyer in his private chapel.

After her conversion she went straight to Breslau: "Mother," she said, "I am a Catholic." The two women cried. Hedwig Conrad Martius wrote: "Behold, two Israelites indeed, in whom is no deceit!" (cf. John 1:47).

Immediately after her conversion she wanted to join a Carmelite convent. However, her spiritual mentors, Vicar-General Schwind of Speyer, and Erich Przywara SJ, stopped her from doing so. Until Easter 1931 she held a position teaching German and history at the Dominican Sisters' school and teacher training college of St. Magdalen's Convent in Speyer. At the same time she was encouraged by Arch-Abbot Raphael Walzer of Beuron Abbey to accept extensive speaking engagements, mainly on women's issues. "During the time immediately before and quite some time after my conversion I ... thought that leading a religious life meant giving up all earthly things and having one's mind fixed on divine things only. 

Gradually, however, I learnt that other things are expected of us in this world... I even believe that the deeper someone is drawn to God, the more he has to `get beyond himself' in this sense, that is, go into the world and carry divine life into it."

She worked enormously hard, translating the letters and diaries of Cardinal Newman from his pre-Catholic period as well as Thomas Aquinas' Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate. The latter was a very free translation, for the sake of dialogue with modern philosophy. Erich Przywara also encouraged her to write her own philosophical works. She learnt that it was possible to "pursue scholarship as a service to God... It was not until I had understood this that I seriously began to approach academic work again." To gain strength for her life and work, she frequently went to the Benedictine Monastery of Beuron, to celebrate the great festivals of the Church year.

In 1931 Edith Stein left the convent school in Speyer and devoted herself to working for a professorship again, this time in Breslau and Freiburg, though her endeavours were in vain. It was then that she wrote Potency and Act, a study of the central concepts developed by Thomas Aquinas. Later, at the Carmelite Convent in Cologne, she rewrote this study to produce her main philosophical and theological oeuvre, Finite and Eternal Being. By then, however, it was no longer possible to print the book.

In 1932 she accepted a lectureship position at the Roman Catholic division of the German Institute for Educational Studies at the University of Munster, where she developed her anthropology. She successfully combined scholarship and faith in her work and her teaching, seeking to be a "tool of the Lord" in everything she taught. "If anyone comes to me, I want to lead them to Him."

In 1933 darkness broke out over Germany. "I had heard of severe measures against Jews before. But now it dawned on me that God had laid his hand heavily on His people, and that the destiny of these people would also be mine." The Aryan Law of the Nazis made it impossible for Edith Stein to continue teaching. "If I can't go on here, then there are no longer any opportunities for me in Germany," she wrote; "I had become a stranger in the world."

The Arch-Abbot of Beuron, Walzer, now no longer stopped her from entering a Carmelite convent. While in Speyer, she had already taken a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience. In 1933 she met with the prioress of the Carmelite Convent in Cologne. "Human activities cannot help us, but only the suffering of Christ. It is my desire to share in it."

Edith Stein went to Breslau for the last time, to say good-bye to her mother and her family. Her last day at home was her birthday, 12 October, which was also the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles. Edith went to the synagogue with her mother. It was a hard day for the two women. "Why did you get to know it [Christianity]?" her mother asked, "I don't want to say anything against him. He may have been a very good person. But why did he make himself God?" Edith's mother cried. The following day Edith was on the train to Cologne. "I did not feel any passionate joy. What I had just experienced was too terrible. But I felt a profound peace - in the safe haven of God's will." From now on she wrote to her mother every week, though she never received any replies. Instead, her sister Rosa sent her news from Breslau.

Edith joined the Carmelite Convent of Cologne on 14 October, and her investiture took place on 15 April, 1934. The mass was celebrated by the Arch-Abbot of Beuron. Edith Stein was now known as Sister Teresia Benedicta a Cruce - Teresa, Blessed of the Cross. In 1938 she wrote: "I understood the cross as the destiny of God's people, which was beginning to be apparent at the time (1933). I felt that those who understood the Cross of Christ should take it upon themselves on everybody's behalf. Of course, I know better now what it means to be wedded to the Lord in the sign of the cross. However, one can never comprehend it, because it is a mystery." On 21 April 1935 she took her temporary vows. On 14 September 1936, the renewal of her vows coincided with her mother's death in Breslau. "My mother held on to her faith to the last moment. But as her faith and her firm trust in her God ... were the last thing that was still alive in the throes of her death, I am confident that she will have met a very merciful judge and that she is now my most faithful helper, so that I can reach the goal as well."

When she made her eternal profession on 21 April 1938, she had the words of St. John of the Cross printed on her devotional picture: "Henceforth my only vocation is to love." Her final work was to be devoted to this author.

Edith Stein's entry into the Carmelite Order was not escapism. "Those who join the Carmelite Order are not lost to their near and dear ones, but have been won for them, because it is our vocation to intercede to God for everyone." In particular, she interceded to God for her people: "I keep thinking of Queen Esther who was taken away from her people precisely because God wanted her to plead with the king on behalf of her nation. I am a very poor and powerless little Esther, but the King who has chosen me is infinitely great and merciful. This is great comfort." (31 October 1938)

On 9 November 1938 the anti-Semitism of the Nazis became apparent to the whole world.

Synagogues were burnt, and the Jewish people were subjected to terror. The prioress of the Carmelite Convent in Cologne did her utmost to take Sister Teresia Benedicta a Cruce abroad. On New Year's Eve 1938 she was smuggled across the border into the Netherlands, to the Carmelite Convent in Echt in the Province of Limburg. This is where she wrote her will on 9 June 1939: "Even now I accept the death that God has prepared for me in complete submission and with joy as being his most holy will for me. I ask the Lord to accept my life and my death ... so that the Lord will be accepted by His people and that His Kingdom may come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world."

While in the Cologne convent, Edith Stein had been given permission to start her academic studies again. Among other things, she wrote about "The Life of a Jewish Family" (that is, her own family): "I simply want to report what I experienced as part of Jewish humanity," she said, pointing out that "we who grew up in Judaism have a duty to bear witness ... to the young generation who are brought up in racial hatred from early childhood."

In Echt, Edith Stein hurriedly completed her study of "The Church's Teacher of Mysticism and the Father of the Carmelites, John of the Cross, on the Occasion of the 400th Anniversary of His Birth, 1542-1942." In 1941 she wrote to a friend, who was also a member of her order: "One can only gain a scientia crucis (knowledge of the cross) if one has thoroughly experienced the cross. I have been convinced of this from the first moment onwards and have said with all my heart: 'Ave, Crux, Spes unica' (I welcome you, Cross, our only hope)." Her study on St. John of the Cross is entitled: "Kreuzeswissenschaft" (The Science of the Cross).

Edith Stein was arrested by the Gestapo on 2 August 1942, while she was in the chapel with the other sisters. She was to report within five minutes, together with her sister Rosa, who had also converted and was serving at the Echt Convent. Her last words to be heard in Echt were addressed to Rosa: "Come, we are going for our people."

Together with many other Jewish Christians, the two women were taken to a transit camp in Amersfoort and then to Westerbork. This was an act of retaliation against the letter of protest written by the Dutch Roman Catholic Bishops against the pogroms and deportations of Jews. Edith commented, "I never knew that people could be like this, neither did I know that my brothers and sisters would have to suffer like this. ... I pray for them every hour. Will God hear my prayers? He will certainly hear them in their distress." Prof. Jan Nota, who was greatly attached to her, wrote later: "She is a witness to God's presence in a world where God is absent."

On 7 August, early in the morning, 987 Jews were deported to Auschwitz. It was probably on 9 August that Sister Teresia Benedicta a Cruce, her sister and many other of her people were gassed.
When Edith Stein was beatified in Cologne on 1 May 1987, the Church honoured "a daughter of Israel", as Pope John Paul II put it, who, as a Catholic during Nazi persecution, remained faithful to the crucified Lord Jesus Christ and, as a Jew, to her people in loving faithfulness."

Let's write about Greek Catholics....

Maine Writer- Because my father John Jubinsky was a Greek Catholic. Here (below) is my grandmother's obituary:

Shenandoah, Pennsylvania

Wonderful history reporting published in Commonweal by Kathryn David:

In February 2022, as the Russian military crossed into Ukraine and marched toward Kyiv, Ukrainians and foreigners alike spilled into L’viv, a city thought to be safer because of its proximity to the Polish border. More than six months later, L’viv has become more than a temporary refuge—it has become a center for humanitarian aid, a cultural capital, and a safe haven for thousands of displaced people. As the world has turned its attention to L’viv, observers have recalled the city’s past as the diverse Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg. An urban center in the borderlands of the Habsburg Empire, Lemberg produced political activists, artists, and writers who wrote in Ukrainian, Polish, German, and Yiddish. These figures were critical to the creation of a transnational European culture.

This is the St. Michael the Archangel Greek Catholic cemetery in Wierchomla, Poland, where by Grandfather Joseph Jubinsky lived. (Dzubinsky).

Still overlooked, however, is the city’s role as a Ukrainian spiritual center: under the Habsburgs L’viv became the seat of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. While most Ukrainians today identify as Orthodox (80 percent), a sizable minority are Greek Catholics belonging to this Eastern-rite Catholic Church. These nearly four million Greek Catholics, about 9 percent of Ukraine’s population, are concentrated in L’viv and its surrounding area. Indeed, most of the historic churches in L’viv’s downtown are Catholic.

The Carpatho-Rusyns of Pennsylvania: A project over two decades in the making to write the history.

The Catholic presence in L’viv is not simply a historical curiosity. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has played an outsized role not just in the local culture, but in the creation of the Ukrainian nation. Historically, it has been in the moments when the fate of Ukraine hung in the balance that the Greek Catholic Church made its largest impacts. As L’viv takes on new importance in the Ukrainian war effort, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has again become more visible, not only locally but throughout the region. 

What can history tell us about how this current war will influence this overlooked religious community? Will the Church yet again be in a position to shape Ukrainian history?

Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church is a product of the shifting borders that have characterized so much of Eastern Europe’s history. When an alliance of principalities coalesced to form the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, its leadership had to figure out how to absorb Orthodox Slavs from the territories of what is now Ukraine into their Catholic realm. 

Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church

In fact, the nobility and the clergy settled on a church union in 1596, which would allow locals to continue to practice the Eastern-rite customs of Orthodox Christianity while accepting the spiritual authority of the pope, creating what was known then as the Ruthenian Uniate Church and is known today as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Although the institution was founded in 1596, this Church traces its Christianity to Grand Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir in Russian) who adopted Byzantine Christianity for his kingdom in medieval Kyiv in 988. In this way, Greek Catholics see their spiritual heritage as emanating from the same source as the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches.

When the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth weakened in the late eighteenth century, its territories were partitioned and Greek Catholics found themselves divided between two empires with radically different approaches to this Church: the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Imperial Russia saw the Greek Catholic Church as an imposition of Catholicism on a population that it deemed part of the Orthodox world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the imperial Russian state banned the Church and forcibly transferred clergy, believers, and properties from the Greek Catholic Church to the Russian Orthodox Church. All the while, they called this process a “reunification,” claiming they were “reunifying” Greek Catholics with their Orthodox brethren as their lands and sacred spaces were annexed by Russia. Tellingly, Putin and his allies use similar rhetoric of “reunification” to justify Russia’s current war in Ukraine.

The treatment of the Church by Catholic Austria-Hungary was quite the opposite. As Catholics, the Habsburgs poured resources into the Greek Catholic Church to place it on more even footing with the Roman Catholic Church. This included state funding for seminaries, programs to allow Greek Catholic clergy to study in Rome, and money to build opulent cathedrals in the styles of the day. In 1817, the support of the Habsburg emperor allowed the Vatican to establish a metropolitan in Lemberg for the Greek Catholic Church. For the Habsburgs, this move was also meant to fight Russian influence. A well-funded and state-supported Greek Catholic Church, it was thought, would insulate the population from Russian state-funded Orthodox missions in the borderland city.

Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church is a product of the shifting borders that have characterized so much of Eastern Europe’s history. When an alliance of principalities coalesced to form the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, its leadership had to figure out how to absorb Orthodox Slavs from the territories of what is now Ukraine into their Catholic realm. The nobility and the clergy settled on a church union in 1596, which would allow locals to continue to practice the Eastern-rite customs of Orthodox Christianity while accepting the spiritual authority of the pope, creating what was known then as the Ruthenian Uniate Church and is known today as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Although the institution was founded in 1596, this Church traces its Christianity to Grand Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir in Russian) who adopted Byzantine Christianity for his kingdom in medieval Kyiv in 988. In this way, Greek Catholics see their spiritual heritage as emanating from the same source as the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches.

When the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth weakened in the late eighteenth century, its territories were partitioned and Greek Catholics found themselves divided between two empires with radically different approaches to this Church: the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Imperial Russia saw the Greek Catholic Church as an imposition of Catholicism on a population that it deemed part of the Orthodox world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the imperial Russian state banned the Church and forcibly transferred clergy, believers, and properties from the Greek Catholic Church to the Russian Orthodox Church. All the while, they called this process a “reunification,” claiming they were “reunifying” Greek Catholics with their Orthodox brethren as their lands and sacred spaces were annexed by Russia. Tellingly, Putin and his allies use similar rhetoric of “reunification” to justify Russia’s current war in Ukraine.

The treatment of the Church by Catholic Austria-Hungary was quite the opposite. As Catholics, the Habsburgs poured resources into the Greek Catholic Church to place it on more even footing with the Roman Catholic Church. This included state funding for seminaries, programs to allow Greek Catholic clergy to study in Rome, and money to build opulent cathedrals in the styles of the day. 

In 1817, the support of the Habsburg emperor allowed the Vatican to establish a metropolitan in Lemberg for the Greek Catholic Church. 

For the Habsburgs, this move was also meant to fight Russian influence. A well-funded and state-supported Greek Catholic Church, it was thought, would insulate the population from Russian state-funded Orthodox missions in the borderland city.

Yet, perhaps the most consequential impact of Habsburg state support for the Church was the creation of a highly educated clergy deeply ingrained in European networks of both religious and secular scholarship. And because the Greek Catholic Church, like the Orthodox Church, permits married clergy, these highly educated clergy soon became scions for families that served as the foundation of an intelligentsia in Austria-Hungary. It was these educated priests and their children who laid the foundation for the Ukrainian national movement in the late nineteenth century, a movement that emerged alongside Russian, Polish, and Jewish national movements in the region. These activists sought to forge connections with Orthodox Ukrainians across the border in imperial Russia, grappling with a key question: Could a population that straddled multiple empires and confessions become one people?

As Europe entered the twentieth century, the clergy of the Greek Catholic Church found that their visions for the Ukrainian nation were quickly being overtaken by more radical forms of nationalism.

At the same time, some of their parishioners were eschewing national identifications altogether, embracing socialism and class-based solidarities along with it. 

How could the Church remain a meaningful presence in the lives of its flock with all of these shifts? This question fell to the man who was selected as metropolitan in 1900, serving until his death in 1944: Andrei Sheptytsky. 

The Church’s history in the twentieth century came to be defined by Sheptytsky, not just because he was an extraordinary leader, but because in those forty-four years, Sheptytsky radically redefined the Church’s role in society and left a legacy that shapes the Church to this day.

From 1900 to 1944, the seat of the Church, then Lemberg and today L’viv, and its surrounding region changed hands from Austria-Hungary to Poland (1918), and later Soviet Ukraine (1939), weathering two world wars. There were also short-lived but incredibly consequential occupations as imperial Russia fought Austria-Hungary during War World I; Reds fought Whites during the Russian Civil War; Soviets fought Nazis during World War II; and partisans of various loyalties fought each other, all in the city of L’viv. In the absence of a stable government, Sheptytsky positioned the Church to serve as a government for his stateless flock and, as metropolitan, was given a seat at tables normally reserved for diplomats. 

Andrey (Andrei) Sheptytsky (1865-1944)

A statesman as well as a churchman, Sheptytsky used his own family’s vast personal wealth and the Church’s holdings to create institutions where the string of states in the region had failed, founding museums, schools, and charities to serve L’viv’s vulnerable population, including veterans of the countless wars. 

With each new government, he used his position as head of the Church to advocate not just for Greek Catholics but for the Ukrainian minority as a whole, lobbying for Ukrainian-language rights and religious tolerance for both Orthodox and Catholic Ukrainians.

Despite this advocacy, Sheptytsky would have bristled at the suggestion that he was a nationalist, at least in the way it was understood at the time. Indeed, Sheptytsky was a vocal critic of radical nationalist movements taking hold in the region. 

He especially criticized violence between Poles and Ukrainians, using his platform to condemn the Polish government’s treatment of its Ukrainian minority in the 1930s, as well as terrorist acts committed by right-wing Ukrainian nationalist groups against Polish rule.

But there were limits to his influence among a population of believers that then numbered around three million. Sheptytsky may have condemned radical nationalism as counter to the Church’s teaching, but his parishioners and even members of the clergy did not always see it that way. The combination of the Great Depression and an increasingly repressive Polish government left the local population desperate for fundamental change. The Church’s refusal to engage in a real way with mass politics caused many to search elsewhere for advocacy, including among the local nationalist and socialist movements. In letters preserved in the Vatican’s Archive for Eastern Churches, Sheptytsky wrote to the Vatican in the 1930s about these developments, fearing that nationalist politics were replacing Christian values among his flock, including within the priesthood. He feared the consequences of a population committed to the nation above all, instead of service to God.

Even with these prescient insights, Sheptytsky could not have predicted what he and his Church would face during the Second World War. In 1939, L’viv and its surrounding region were annexed to Stalin’s Soviet Union after the Nazi–Soviet pact split up Poland. From 1939 to 1941, Sheptytsky did his best to serve as a diplomat yet again, negotiating with the officially atheist Soviet state to protect his Church in exchange for a promise that the Church would not criticize the new Stalinist order. For their part, the Soviets understood that because of the Church’s influence in the region, an all-out assault against Sheptytsky and the clergy would only inspire anger. That assault would come later—once the Soviet Union had decisively won the war and Sheptytsky was no longer alive to combat it.

In letters to the Vatican that Sheptytsky managed to smuggle out during this first Soviet occupation, he did not hide his true feelings about the regime he publicly declared loyalty to. He documented the crimes perpetrated against the local Polish population, which was singled out by Soviet authorities for mass arrest and deportation as a remnant of the old regime. He noted that the ubiquitous secret police presented the population with a series of impossible choices and commented on an overall moral degradation in the face of the violence of Soviet occupation.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Sheptytsky was forced to face a new reality. The series of choices Sheptytsky made in this period have come under a great deal of scrutiny by historians and remain a topic of debate. Although many avoid engaging with the complexities of the Church’s history during World War II, the full picture offers insight into what Ukraine faced during this era, and crucially, what the Church might mean for Ukraine today.

Like many other L’vivians, Sheptytsky initially saw the Nazi invasion in 1941 as a liberation from Soviet rule. While some locals, especially radical nationalist groups, welcomed the opportunity to participate in violence against Jews and “Soviet collaborators” in service to the Nazi regime, this was not the case for Sheptytsky and many of his fellow clergy. Rather, Sheptytsky simply believed that nothing could be worse than the imposition of Stalinism his community had faced in the past two years. He took seriously promises from the Nazis that they would honor religious freedom and support movements for Ukrainian independence. It was this hopefulness that perhaps explains why Sheptytsky said nothing when pogroms against the local Jewish population broke out in the first months of Nazi occupation in the summer of 1941. Many of his own flock were the perpetrators of these pogroms, and, according to reports gathered later, Greek Catholic priests condoned the violence as revenge against the Soviet secret police, blaming local Jews for the crimes of the Soviet state.

But Sheptytsky’s compliance with Nazi authorities was short-lived. As the Nazi occupation grew more violent and repressive, Sheptytsky used the little freedom he had to make his views known. His pastoral letters were banned by the Nazis, but he found ways to circulate them anyway to his parishes. In these letters he condemned those who had collaborated with the Nazis and the violence being committed by both the German occupiers and the local population against Jews and later Polish civilians. 

Moreover, Sheptytsky was the first religious leader to report to the Vatican about the mass killings of Jews that later became known as the Holocaust and pleaded that these crimes be made known to the world.

Considering how many of Europe’s religious leaders openly collaborated with Nazi occupation, this alone distinguishes Sheptytsky and the Greek Catholic Church from other religious institutions. But Sheptytsky went further. He and his brother Kliment, also a Church hierarch, were instrumental in helping conceal Jews from the Nazis, allowing them to hide out in rural monasteries, ultimately saving the lives of over a hundred local Jews. He managed to orchestrate all this while confined to a wheelchair by injuries and illnesses caused by old age and the trauma of war.

Still, despite Sheptytsky’s objections, Nazi authorities hoped to use the Church and its symbolism to give themselves moral authority. As Soviet forces were closing in, the Nazis formed a special SS unit to be made up of local Ukrainians and asked for the Church’s assistance in mobilizing it. While Sheptytsky sanctioned this, he also lobbied for this unit to have Greek Catholic priests serve as chaplains—making it the only Nazi SS unit with a chaplaincy. Scholars have been split on the meaning of this decision: Was it an attempt by Sheptytsky to encourage these draftees to remember their values and the Church’s teachings as they fought a thoroughly unjust war? Or was it a way for the Church to give its blessing to these soldiers, in support of their ultimate mission to defeat the rapidly approaching Soviet army?

Here lies the central dilemma in interpreting the Greek Catholic Church and its leadership during a cataclysmic war. Those who denounce Sheptytsky as a “collaborator” ignore both the moments he risked everything to resist, and even more significantly, the limitations imposed on anyone trying to negotiate between Hitler and Stalin. At the same time, Sheptytsky himself argued that war should not be used as an excuse to abandon one’s values. Therefore, to get a full picture of the complicated people and institutions of the Church, it is necessary to acknowledge the moments it did not lead the way it should have.

Andrei Sheptytsky died in 1944, a few months after the Soviets retook L’viv and annexed it to Soviet Ukraine, where the city would remain until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Soviet state authorities allowed Sheptytsky an official funeral in acknowledgement of, if not respect for, his authority. In Soviet state reports from the funeral, informants said that mourners came from all sectors of society—including workers, peasants, students, and members of the intelligentsia—and remarked upon the massive influence this man and the Church had on the local population. Soviet authorities took this to mean that his death had left open a power vacuum and an opportunity to repress the Church once and for all.

Indeed, a few months after his death Soviet authorities began attacking the Church and Sheptytsky himself, claiming the Church had supported Nazi occupation and had to be punished along with all other “collaborators.” Soviet authorities banned the Church and forcibly transferred its clergy, property, and believers to an official, state-run Russian Orthodox Church, echoing the policies previously pursued by imperial Russia. Those who resisted faced arrest, exile, and death. Under duress, some clergy and parishioners accepted the imposition of Orthodoxy, finding ways to outwardly appear dedicated members of the Orthodox Church while holding on to their Greek Catholic faith. Others formed an underground Greek Catholic Church that operated in secret throughout the rest of the lifespan of the Soviet Union. When movements for independence gained momentum in Soviet Ukraine in the 1980s, members of the underground Greek Catholic Church played a pivotal role. Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was once again permitted to operate legally from its seat in L’viv, now a city in independent Ukraine.

What lessons does this history offer the Greek Catholic Church today, as it once again confronts an unexpected war? The Church of today wants the public to understand its historical role as a moral authority for Ukrainian society. In this way, it can offer a powerful alternative to Russia’s narratives about Ukraine. Unlike the Orthodox Church, its spiritual heritage is separate from Russia. The role of its clergy and believers in the Ukrainian national movement in Austria-Hungary ties Ukrainians to Europe. In response to Russian charges of Ukrainian “fascism,” the Church can demonstrate that it was one of the few churches in Europe that resisted full collaboration with Nazi rule.

But how to apply the lessons of history in practice? In some ways, the legacy of Sheptytsky is carried on through the Church’s active engagement in Ukrainian civil society. In the early 1990s the Church’s ability to draw on European Catholic networks, as well as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic diaspora in the United States and Canada, gave the institution access to people and resources that other Ukrainian institutions did not have. Through these networks the Church helped to found one of Ukraine’s most prestigious universities, Ukrainian Catholic University in L’viv, in addition to a plethora of humanitarian organizations and NGOs. Critically, the Greek Catholic Church’s access to global Catholic institutions allowed the Church to mobilize a Ukraine-wide network of social outreach that extends far past west Ukraine and has outpaced smaller charitable endeavors by Ukraine’s Orthodox Churches.

A true test for the Church’s role in post-Soviet, independent Ukraine came with the outbreak of war in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and backed a separatist movement in eastern Ukraine. Between 2014 and 2021, over fourteen thousand soldiers were killed fighting in eastern Ukraine and over one million Ukrainians were internally displaced. While the battles took place in eastern Ukrainian regions with few Greek Catholics, the Greek Catholic Church managed to mobilize extensively for the war effort—far more so than Ukraine’s Orthodox Churches. As anthropologist Catherine Wanner has argued, the Church’s ability to draw on Roman Catholic war relief networks allowed the Greek Catholic Church to fill in gaps left by the Ukrainian state, including through direct support for the Ukrainian armed forces.

Most critically, in 2010, the Greek Catholic Church established a military chaplaincy that took on a new urgency when the war began in 2014. These chaplains were called to address the spiritual needs of Greek Catholic soldiers, overrepresented in the armed forces due to west Ukraine’s high level of military service, as well as the needs of soldiers from various Orthodox denominations.

The Church’s role as a spiritual bulwark for Ukraine’s armed forces takes a physical form in the Garrison Church in L’viv, which is run by Greek Catholic chaplains and dedicated to soldiers and their families. While the church structure and much of its sacred art date back centuries, the church intentionally mixes traditional religious objects with modern symbols of warfare, like shell casings and pieces of shrapnel. Reporters who have attended Mass at this church note the presence of military families among the congregants and sermons that are specifically about the challenges of the war. As a Times of Israel journalist recalled, priests at the Garrison Church were as likely to be found packing up food and supplies for soldiers, military families, and refugees as they would be leading the liturgy. This building offers a clear example of how the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church sees its role: not simply as a spiritual guide, but as an active participant in shaping Ukrainian society at war, just like Sheptytsky’s Church.

Still, debates that engulfed the Church in the previous century remain unresolved. What is the role for a minority Catholic Church in Ukrainian nation-building, especially for a nation that draws so much on its Orthodox heritage? In 2019, the Orthodox world recognized the existence of an independent (autocephalous) Ukrainian Orthodox Church, separate from the Russian Orthodox Church. While Russia denies the legitimacy of this independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its existence has been a powerful tool for the Ukrainian state to assert a religious foundation that cannot be claimed by Moscow. Where does this leave non-Orthodox religious groups like the Greek Catholic Church? There is an opportunity for the Greek Catholic Church to advance the same idea some Ukrainian activists supported in the nineteenth century: a Ukrainian nation with roots in multiple spiritual traditions. Just as Sheptytsky advocated for the rights of Ukrainian Orthodox alongside Ukrainian Greek Catholics, the present-day Church has supported the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s campaign to be recognized as autocephalous. But the two Churches remain in tension as they grapple with the idea that only one Church can claim to be the moral authority of the Ukrainian nation.

And just as in the twentieth century, many Ukrainians remain unsure of the Church’s capacity to address the problems Ukraine faced before this war and that have only worsened since. The Church remains more conservative on social issues than the rest of Ukraine’s population, recently opposing Ukraine’s participation in the Istanbul Convention on preventing violence against women. As Ukraine attempts to promote an image of itself to the world as more progressive than Russia on women’s and LGBT rights, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church consistently opposes legislation meant to protect these communities from violence and discrimination. Moreover, in the project of reckoning with Ukraine’s complicated past, the Church has remained mostly silent. In some cases, Greek Catholic organizations have even sponsored initiatives to present a whitewashed version of Ukraine’s history, such as in the case of the controversial Lonsky Prison Museum, which lionizes some radical nationalists whom Sheptytsky himself condemned.

In wartime it is tempting to gloss over these complexities. It is clear to Ukrainians of all faiths that the Church is involved in multiple projects to sustain the country through this brutal war, building on a tradition of serving the needs of the Ukrainian people when other institutions fail them. In this way, the Church is certainly molding itself in the image crafted by Sheptytsky.

In a recent piece for the Economist, Fr. Andriy Zelinskyy, chief military chaplain for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, offered his view of the Church’s role during this brutal war: “There was never a reason for this war and the Russian army has never had a mission. It was void of sense right from the very beginning. That’s why it is imperative that, if we are to restore global security and personal dignity, we answer the questions it raises.”

In the twentieth century, Sheptytsky’s Church saw itself in the same role as it endured brutal occupations by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union’s repression ultimately made it difficult for the Church to confront the trauma of war and reckon with life after. 

Today, as Fr. Zelinskyy reminds us, it seems that the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine may have the chance to answer the questions raised by the war. What answers it will provide, and whether they are the right ones for today’s Ukraine, remains to be seen.

Writing about a Christmas foretold- Is Christmas getting older or is it just us?

Maine Writer-  I am a fan of Christmas stories, beginning with 

Matthew 1:18-23.  In modern literature, I read Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", every year, it's  fabulous short story!  O. Henry wrote a brilliant story in "Gift of the Maji" and John Grisham's "Skipping Christmas" is a fun read.  Ray Bradbury's unexpected short story, "Bless Me Father, for I have Sinned" is a Christmas Eve miracle lesson about witnessing our eventual mortality.  

So, I fell for this story by Jean-Phillipe Blondel, from the anthology titled "A Very French Christmas".  This short Christmas story is titled, "The Gift", about how holiday celebrations are practically immortal when relived in the memories of those who, with all the best intentions, create ritual traditions that transcend time. And time takes its inevitable toll. Check out Literary Hub!

Echo about a Christmas foretold in "The Gift", by Jean-Phillipe Blondel: To be honest, I’ve always loathed Christmas. 

Of course, it was a bit different when the children were little and ran around the house clapping their hands, but that didn’t last too long. They quickly realized that Father Christmas didn’t exist and that this was just an occasion to get or to try to get things they had been wanting for the past several months. The ideal moment for being angry or sullen because they didn’t receive exactly what they had “ordered.” There’s nothing like the verb “to order” to evoke the year-end holidays for me.

But I’m being unfair to them. It didn’t start with their birth, but well before. With my own childhood. My father, who was promoted within his company soon after my arrival on earth, had to move for his new position. My parents didn’t know anyone in the large provincial town where they were to establish themselves. My grandparents lived far away; they were old and in poor health. We didn’t have guests over on the night before Christmas, or New Year’s Eve. We’d hear the neighbors celebrating one floor below. And above us as well. And next door. We were surrounded by party hats and horns. We’d unwrap slices of cellophane-sealed salmon. We cut up the frozen lamb. We savored bûche de Noël bought at the supermarket. All in semi-religious silence, my brother, my mother, my father and me. One might have thought I’d find comfort in my older brother, but we were six years apart in age and he always wanted to escape from this hellish silence, which he finally managed to do very early, leaving me to endure as well I could the meals, the weekends, the holidays and the end of year celebrations.

Hélène, on the other hand, adored Christmas. She had the enthusiasm of a little girl, spending hours debating the decoration of the tree (should it be blue and silver or red and gold this year?), baking cookies, buying Advent calendars, chocolates and spices for mulled wine.

It’s because of her that our children love Christmas—there’s no doubt about that. After the divorce, of course, things got slightly complicated. The children, who were adults by then, bent themselves out of shape to not leave their father or mother alone for Christmas Eve or Day. Thibault, the eldest, usually arranged to be with my ex-wife the evening of the 24th and would come to spend the next day with me, while Isabelle and Pierre, the younger ones, did the opposite. Of course, when they each married and had their own children, that all became unmanageable and family gatherings got more haphazard—I certainly didn’t complain about it. Thibault, who for years had been a financial advisor, began to hate his job and suddenly threw it aside to realize his dream of opening a restaurant. But not just any restaurant: typically French cuisine, with locally grown products, all organic. Thibault wanted us to inaugurate his establishment all together the following Christmas—father, mother, offspring, uncles, aunts, cousins —the clan in all its splendor. Hélène’s heart attack on December 22nd changed all that. She was buried four days later. She was sixty-seven years old. By that time, we’d already been divorced for two decades. We hadn’t seen each other for several months. Following these events, it was decided at a family meeting from which I was evidently excluded that on each and every December 25th, the entire family would now have lunch at Thibault’s restaurant —La Tambouille—the name meant Chow—so that the living could celebrate, open their presents together and see joy spread over the faces of the youngest ones while also paying homage to the deceased mother. It’s now the twelfth Christmas since my ex-wife’s death. I’m seventy-nine years old. I’m still in decent shape. Even if my hearing is showing signs of fatigue, my vision is still excellent and I still regularly do fifteen minutes of exercise daily as well as one or two walks a day. Nevertheless, we know—the children, grandchildren and I—that I’m not immortal and that soon, on the 25th, they’ll also be honoring my memory.

Like every year for the past dozen, I’m waiting for them. They have to come pick up “Grandpa.” Pierre and Isabelle will probably be in charge because Thibault is busy in the kitchen with his staff. He decided a few years ago that the restaurant should open for lunch on the twenty-fifth. To be sure, we won’t be the only guests, thereby combining the beneficial (that’s to say the profitable) with the pleasurable (his idea of a family gathering is one where he makes only periodic appearances since he’s occupied in the kitchen). We thought the idea was doomed to fail (who after all was going to go out for lunch at a restaurant at noon on December 25th?) but it turned out to be extremely sound. The place is totally packed each year, with tables booked up sometimes six months in advance. Pierre and Isabelle, then, and without doubt one or two members of the third generation, those adorable kids who gradually transform themselves into brooding, unpleasant adolescents and then into impertinent and ironical adults. As always, “Grandpa” gets put in the passenger seat, known as the “death spot,” perhaps betraying a secret desire on their part, even if they all find me endearing, to see me gone and buried so they can divvy up their inheritance; it seems I’m much richer than I appear and that, thanks to well advised investments, I’ve managed to amass a small fortune. They’ve casually tried to ask me about this. I’ve said nothing to confirm or deny the rumor. They tell “Grandpa” how happy they are to see him in good form; they shower him with charming, bland smiles, telling him about the latest exploits of the youngest grandchildren and bringing him up to date on the brilliant careers of the eldest. They remind him of the names of the first great grandchildren. And then in the end, when there’s not much of a response beyond a grunt or a gurgle, they lean back in their seats saying that “Grandpa” isn’t so easygoing, he always had a difficult character and that doesn’t change with age, he could still be a bit more polite and show a little more gratitude toward this family that spends Christmas Day with him; he barely smiles, it’s true, which seems to prove that he doesn’t enjoy it and that we organize the whole hoopla for nothing, he’d rather stay at home near the radiator with a book; ah yes, books, for “Grandpa,” you’d think they were more important than human beings.

How can they possibly know such things? No member of this family reads novels, except for mass-market bestsellers, clichéd thrillers with contrived plots, idiotic romances or discounted pseudoeroticism. And so forth. They drag the books around with them during the summer, glancing at a few lines and then quickly going back to their preferred activities—catching up on the latest gossip and convincing themselves that the life they’ve chosen is better than it is. Voilà. The absence of literature, among my children, is the most crushing failure of my existence. It’s not yours, Hélène, I know. You used to reproach my passion for reading. My dilettantism—you used to say there are so many other more interesting and certainly more useful things to do— fixing things around the house, rearranging the furniture, laundry, cooking. Don’t misunderstand me. I did my share of household chores, you can’t say otherwise, but it was never enough. And above all, you started to detest books. But that wasn’t the case at the beginning. We’d finished our respective studies, you always had a novel in your purse, even if you didn’t open it too often. I don’t know what happened to us, Hélène. Or rather, I do. The kids soaked up our energy and our sense of self. We devoted all our time to them. We were happy to let them devour us. But you see, it’s excruciating, isn’t it, while I’m waiting for them here on the sofa twelve years after your death and probably for not too much longer, while I’m sighing at the idea of losing my first name and my personality to become “Grandpa,” because now even Pierre, Isabelle and Thibault call me “Grandpa” and no longer “Papa,” just as I began to call you “Maman” instead of using your first name; people ought to pay attention to those vocabulary shifts since they’re indicative of the real turn of events— while I’m waiting for them and close my eyes as I listen out for the honking of the horn announcing their arrival, I wonder if we were right.

Absolutely.

Because the wild part of me, that part that frightened and delighted you at the start of our relationship, the part that you swore to tame and that you managed to subdue until, realizing that a certain routine had become our existence, you began to be bored to death and to find our union so dull that you opted to file for divorce—that part of me that defined me as much as my other, more refined side, more consensual, the lover of books and fine liquors, the midlevel manager of a textile company, a pretty boy who was a bit too affable, that part,

I believe I’ve lost. And when you lose part of your identity, you already have one foot in the grave. Don’t worry, the other three will follow soon.

I still talk to you, you see, Hélène. Even though our divorce was finalized thirty-two years ago. Even though after you, there was Lydia, that shapely redhead who you became jealous of when we separated. And then Ludmilla. Olivia. Anne. Elisabeth. Five women in thirty-two years. Two women with whom, in contrast to you, I stayed on good terms. It has to be said that the stakes weren’t the same. We were adults, immune, parents, we knew life wasn’t a bed of roses. I meet them sometimes for lunch or dinner. We get along well. I don’t have the slightest regret. In any case, in my emotional life, I have no regrets. And that includes you, for sure, Hélène. I’m happy to have shared all those years with you. Well, perhaps not those last five.

Sorry?

Who?

Ah, yes, okay. One.

I have one regret.

Only one. In seventy-nine years of life. I can’t complain. There. I hear the horn honking. It’s time for me to turn into “Grandpa*,” Hélène. Leave me.

One p.m. Still two hours to go and then I can pretend I’m exhausted and they’ll take me home. I try to put on a good face. I smile when spoken to—it’s one of the rare things that connect me to youth—smiling. I’ve always taken care of my teeth and they’re still in astonishingly good condition for my age. Two implants, a bridge, the rest are original. Their color hasn’t been too spoiled by the cigarettes I smoked with punishing regularity for three decades until stopping abruptly at age fifty. That hasn’t prevented from me from dreaming of taking a puff once in a while—and even from imagining that I smell cigarette smoke in the midst of this group of non-smokers who make up my family and who speak about me in the third person. The stilted thanks, the fake cries of pleasure, the obligatory joy. I join in. I don’t want them to reproach me for spoiling their day. But when I open the packages, I nearly faint. A pair of socks, a bathrobe, a comb; items fit for the hospital or retirement home. Jonas, one of my less irritating grandsons, gave me a watch, a rather ugly metal watch, true, but still it was a present you might receive at any age. Evidently, no one managed to buy me a novel because, as Chantal, Thibault’s wife, declared, “You’re hard to buy for, Grandpa, you’ve read them all, and who knows what you’d like.” It wouldn’t have occurred to anybody to ask me ahead of time for a list, for example. An old guy has no desires, that’s well known. And plus to give me a novel, that would mean going into the center of town, walking into a bookshop—it doesn’t take much more than that. You could buy one at a superstore, but Grandpa doesn’t like novels from superstores, it seems. He’s difficult, Grandpa.

The restaurant is full. It’s been transformed for the occasion. Instead of twenty tables of four or six, there are five large tables—five families gathered to share a convivial moment. Three of them are regulars. They make an appearance here every December 25. The fourth, no. New people. They’re a bit less numerous than we are, but they’re still a good dozen. Two daughters, their husbands, the grandchildren, two or three in-laws, and then, presiding over the assembly, a woman with white hair. The grandfather must have given up the ghost. Men generally resist less well than their spouses. I’m observing her. Her slightly absent look. The smile floating on her lips. She’s bored as well. She feels a bit guilty since she should feel great, there with all her family—but she suppresses a yawn. She’d rather be elsewhere. She’s no longer used to long meals. She never liked them, by the way. I realize that I’m trying to invent a life for her. That’s the problem with literature. One narrates. One embroiders. One adds material.

It’s at this moment she turns her head slightly toward me and our eyes meet.

I hear a faint explosion far away. It’s like a summer storm in the middle of winter, or the start of fireworks whose noise is muffled by the distance. I can’t take myself away from her gaze. My memory has turned into a crazy machine, searching all my internal libraries for the relevant novel, and in this heap of cards and photographs that we store inside ourselves, the information that I need is right there. Because I know her.

I’m sure I know her.

But I don’t recognize her.

I realize that my breath is short and my heart is beating fast—I blush a bit and chuckle. I totally chuckle. At the other end of the room, she narrows her eyes and silently pronounces my name, Thomas; I nod, she too, more slowly. My body panics. I wonder if I’m not going to die there in the middle of a Christmas celebration, from a heart attack whose cause will remain unknown to them, just as they are unaware of my inner compartments, my trajectory, my youth, my life before their mother and with their mother prior to their births, those days of snow or heat waves when our bodies remained entwined and we couldn’t suppress our desire.

My hand on her shoulder.

My young hand on her naked shoulder.

My young hand that slowly unfastens the white bra to unveil this naked shoulder with three moles at the base of the shoulder blade.

Three moles. Hélène didn’t have any in that place. I close my eyes. I see a purple neon sign in the street, a bit farther away, with a cocktail glass and a straw in the shape of a parasol, the Relax Cocktail Lounge, the name comes back to me now. There was an evening get-together, organized by the company executives, “Come on, Thomas,” they said. “You’ll see. It’s really nice, the atmosphere is subdued and the hostesses are obliging.” Hearty laughter. I was embarrassed for

Alice.

There, that’s her name. Alice. Alice Leprince.
She was the only woman in management at Fabre & Sons, and evidently they didn’t think for an instant that their smutty undertone could offend her. I think that actually she didn’t exist for them, she served solely as an example and a counterexample when one reproached them for their retrograde attitude toward women. “But that’s absurd!” thundered the director. “Look at Alice! She’s in charge of exports, isn’t that right, Alice?” Tight smiles. She didn’t stay long. She resigned. She left for the competitor. I never got any news. For a while, yes, I regretted it.

Because there was that moment, suspended. A parenthesis. I had of course promised my colleagues and my superiors that I’d join them at the Relax, but first I had to stretch a little bit, I had a bad back. I’d thought of using headaches as an excuse, but they would have laughed—migraines, that’s feminine, that’s what a woman resorts to when she doesn’t want to make love; migraines are degrading and ridiculous. The back, that’s good. It’s a perfect manly excuse. Lots of weight to carry around, lots of responsibilities and then typically male activity; cutting wood, assembling furniture, spending hours under the hood of a car, and suddenly you find yourself folded in half from lumbago. Yes, definitely, back pain, that’s just what was needed, especially since everyone knew I had a double herniated disc, I broadcast it everywhere when I came back from being seen at the doctor’s. Everybody sympathized. No one checked. I knew that a double herniated disc would be useful to me later. They left in a hubbub of insolence and dirty jokes. Alice Leprince came down a few minutes later. She recoiled slightly upon seeing me and then she put her hand over her mouth, to apologize for this fright that she shouldn’t have had.

“You didn’t go with them?”

“No, I … I told them a white lie: back pain.”

She raised an eyebrow. I didn’t understand what made me, all of a sudden, confess to her the truth that I hid from the others.

“White lie?”

“Yes, it’s made up. But I didn’t feel like…In the end, you know…hostesses, alcohol, raunchy stories…sorry…I don’t want you to think I’m better then them, I…”

“But you are.” “Sorry?”

“Better than them. You are. Undeniably.” “That’s not what they think.”

“They don’t think anything, Thomas. The only thing that interests them is their own careers. And money. Take me, for instance: they think I’m a dummy who needs to be ravished in order to let loose.”

I recall the heat on my face. I wasn’t as free as her. I wasn’t used to a woman talking like that. Hélène wasn’t so crude. Hélène adhered to the norm. “I think I’m going to take a walk in town. Along the river, apparently it’s beautiful.”

“It’s going to be dark soon.” “Exactly. Do you want to join me?”

Such boldness was new for me, an audacity that pushed me to invite a woman I barely knew to join me for an evening walk. I wasn’t the type of man capable of such things. I had a good life; I was a father and a loving husband absorbed in work, a creature of habit whose children made fun of him at times because his rituals were immutable, a prisoner for whom books were the sole diversion—a passion shared by no one around me. And suddenly, with Alice Leprince, I entered into one of those secret novels that frightened and attracted me at the same time. I rediscovered a part of adolescence as well, before my path had already been decided, before bumpy roads became smooth highways.

That’s how we ended up alongside the river, Alice Leprince and me. She very quickly confided her thoughts to me, by the way. Not just about other companies, but other cities, countries, horizons. She felt she couldn’t remain here for too long. She’d leave Fabre & Sons fairly soon. We talked for hours; there were times we said nothing. I hadn’t done that in years. It was as if all barriers had fallen away. In the middle of the night we returned separately to the hotel. She went first. I came back ten minutes later. We were afraid we’d run into our colleagues. We were wrong. They’d already come back. The evening at the Relax had turned out to be disappointing.

My hand on her shoulder.

My hand that slowly unfastens the white bra to unveil this naked shoulder with three moles at the base of the shoulder blade.

I was thirty-nine. She was thirty-three.

I remember all the details. They come to me sometimes at night. I drift from one dream to another and suddenly, she’s a fleeting apparition in a crowd, I run to find her, I cry out that I’m free now, have been free for a while, but she’s caught up in movement and disappears. I sigh. I’m used to it. I think I’ll chase after this chimera until I die.

After my divorce, I tried to find Alice Leprince, even if I imagined her throwing open shutters overlooking the Grand Canal or the temples of Kyoto, an indefatigable adventurer, a freelance journalist, a talent scout. In fact, around the year 2000, I even learned how to use a computer and the Internet for the sole purpose of locating her. But women, by marrying and taking their husband’s last name, can easily erase their earthly traces. I quickly understood that it was wasted effort. Then, there were other interests, other novels, other goals, some traveling, health concerns, family worries, five successive women with whom I shared daily life and age that advances and gnaws. I forgot Alice Leprince.

And then suddenly, she’s there—so different and yet unmistakable. Four decades later. One often believes that when you get older you won’t recognize those you knew when you were young, but that’s not true. It’s totally not true. Sure, the skin has withered, the smile is parched, there are wrinkles, but the face stays the same and the general allure doesn’t change that much in the end. Nor does desire. When she silently mouthed my first name, this name that no one had spoken at this table since I became Grandpa, a Grandpa like all the other Grandpas, a Grandpa without an identity, and when her lips formed “Thomas,” my throat became dry and my hands tingled. She froze for a few seconds, knitted her eyebrows, then furtively nodded her head toward the restaurant entrance. My heart didn’t stop pounding. I complied. The members of her family didn’t see anything. Mine either. A few seconds later, I saw her speak to the person sitting next to her—her daughter?—and move toward the restroom, shooting me a discrete, meaningful look. I coughed. I confided to Pierre, who was to my right, that I had a pressing need and I’d be back in a minute. He wanted to accompany me but I satisfied him with a “and what for?” that kept him from getting up. I sensed a twitching in my muscles and under my skin, as if suddenly I’d returned to life. No one paid attention to us. Grandma. Grandpa. We’re so insignificant in this world oriented toward youth. We found ourselves face-to-face in front of the restrooms. She smiled. I asked her at this point if I was ugly. She shook her head. She apologized. She explained that that’s the way it is, it’s so…

“Unexpected?”

“Unexpected, no. More like not something I thought would actually happen. I knew that your son had taken over the restaurant. I dragged my family here several times in the hope of finding you. I knew you were still alive.”

“You could have just come to my house.”

Thank you, Hélène

She shrugged her shoulders, told me that she’d done that a few times over the past few months, but had never dared to ring the bell, or call. She was afraid. Of everything. That I wouldn’t recognize her. That I would be blind, deaf, on a respirator. Or worse, a victim of Alzheimer’s.

“I remember you so well, Alice. You’re my only regret.”

Her hand stroked mine. The effect was immediate. I felt myself blush to the roots of my hair. She passed a hand through my hair. She suggested that we take a walk by the river.

“What river?”

“There’s one nearby, no? If not, we’ll go a little farther.” “It’s winter, Alice.”

“Do you lack imagination at this stage?” “I’ve always been that way.”

“I’m not sure of that. Will you join me?” “On foot?”

“Let’s not overdo it. In a few minutes, we’ll be frozen. How about you take your car?”

I sigh. I reply that I haven’t driven in ages. She smiles again—lighting up this sordid setting, the entryway to the restrooms in a restaurant called La Tambouille, deep in the French provinces, a day of mandatory libations. She transforms it into a rugged landscape overlooking the Mediterranean, a steep road in the Alps.

“Very well, we’ll take mine. I’ve always liked driving. Wait ten minutes, I’ll go get the keys.”

I cast a nervous glance at the family table. I’m not afraid that they’ll be upset their Christmas has been ruined. No. I fear that they’ll interfere. That they’ll deprive us of this last bit of freedom. I needn’t be so worried. They’re involved in heated conversations mixing politics, TV, social media and celebrities. They’re not paying attention to me.

I see Hélène say a few words to her daughter, smile, touch her arm, and surreptitiously grab her purse. And as she walks along the wall of the restaurant to rejoin me, I hear your voice, Hélène, and it overwhelms me.

I guessed it, you see.

I suspected you were behind all this.

It’s your gift, isn’t it? For my last Christmas? Thank you, Hélène.

* I suspect Jean-Phillipe Blondel would prefer "Pepere" in the French vernacular! 🎄