“We’ve seen intense suffering but we also see people who are resilient and hopeful and they’ve got a grit about them. And that gives me confidence as well,” he said.
“The people of Ukraine have a Ph.D. in suffering. They’ve always been attacked,” Dolan said. “Unfortunately, they are experienced in suffering.”
“So they know that the suffering will be intense. But they know that ultimately, truth and goodness and beauty will prevail. And this gets them through,” he added.
Many Ukrainians recently celebrated Easter Sunday. Flynn, Dolan’s interviewer, noted that people still came out to celebrate Easter in a time of war.
“In the face of that raw evil how can people keep that resilience and their faith?” Flynn asked Dolan.
“Let the people of Ukraine teach us,” the cardinal answered. More than one Ukrainian refugee has told him that the war is not good, but if it had to happen, it is “providential” that it happened during Lent. This is a time, Dolan said, “when we think of the suffering, the Passion, the death of Jesus, when it looked as if darkness and evil and death had conquered, and then found the glory of his resurrection on Easter.”
“These Ukrainians said to me ‘we know by our faith, that He wants us to go through that too. We know that the resurrection will come’,” the cardinal said.
Dolan said that while the Catholic Church could always do better in advocating for peace, he was grateful for what the Church is doing.
In his view, there are three ways that Christian believers can help. The first is prayer.
“We never ever, ever, underestimate that, the power of prayer,” he said.
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And Christians should engage in advocacy, meaning they should “stand up” for those who are affected and “speak against the atrocity.”
Finally, Christians must work to aid the victims and give assistance.
“That’s when we’ve got a winning recipe,” he said.
Russian Orthodoxy has thrown support behind Putin and the Ukraine invasion. In Dolan’s analysis, this reflects a dangerous fusion of religion and nationalism.
“Whenever in history you have religion and nationalism united, you’ve got trouble,” he said. While patriotism is a virtue, nationalism is a vice, an “excessive allegiance to one’s country, even over God.”
For Dolan, it is “very difficult to understand” how religious leaders or Putin could look to their faith to justify this.