Speech by Bishop Mykola Cardinal Bychok at the Catholic Social Services Australia National Conference in Sydney

Speech by Bishop Mykola Cardinal Bychok at the Catholic Social Services Australia National Conference in Sydney

19 March 2025

I want to begin by offering my sincere thanks to organisers of this National Conference for Catholic Social Services Australia and for the invitation to give this address. It is a true joy to be among you all, to gather in friendship and to celebrate the wonderful work of Catholic Social Services Australia. Your commitment to living out the words of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in doing all that we can for “the least of these brethren” (Mt 25:40) and by striving for a faith that is alive (Jam 2:14–26) and bears fruit (Mt 7:15–20), is a gift for our Church. The necessary work that you do in making known and practicing Catholic Social Teaching, and by advocating for justice especially for the most vulnerable in our communities is a form of evangelisation — a way of proclaiming the Gospel. So, thank you all for the love you have for the Lord, for his Church and for all people.

Today I want to speak about the relationship of peace and truth. As you all know, the first of these, peace, is sadly being threatened in many parts of the world. There are serious conflicts taking place in parts of Africa such as Congo, Sudan; in Asia such as Myanmar, and parts of Pakistan and India; in the Middle East in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria; and in Europe, my birthplace of Ukraine has been under attack for more than 3 years now after full scale invasion of russia and 11 years after the occupation of Crimean Peninsula and 2 regions of eastern part of Ukraine. The scale of human suffering caused by war is unspeakable and it cries out to God. As Pope Francis said “war is a failure of politics and humanity, a shameful capitulation” to the forces of evil (Fratelli tutti, 261). His predecessor Pope Benedict XVI referred to war as “a calamity that is in contrast with the plan of God” and his predecessor, St John Paul II called war “madness.”

Tragically, there are signs that lasting peace may still be quite far away in many of these conflicts. In the case of Ukraine, the possibility of peace under certain conditions has been a topic of fierce debate lately but unfortunately there are alternative views on the truth of this war. Some have even tried to claim that Ukraine is the aggressor and that the Ukrainian people do not want peace! Forgetting the fact that it was Ukraine that was invaded, not just in 2022, but back in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea. Of course, when there are such falsehoods held and promoted by powerful people and nations, peace can seem very far off.

But for Christians, peace must be more than an aspiration or dream. It must, as St Paul says, be kept in our hearts through God (Phil 4:6), indeed Christ gifts his disciples and all of us nothing less than his peace: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you” (Jn 14:27). He also tells us that in becoming peacemakers, we become children of God (Mt 5:9). But how must we understand this peace and importantly, how might we be able to live out this peace and bring it to others?

Here we must introduce the other element that is non-negotiable when it comes to peace: truth. It is only in confronting truth, face to face, that we are able to discover and experience peace. How so? Well, lies and falsehoods are not of God but come from darkness. Satan is known for being a deceiver, one who sows discord and division, and who uses lies to separate us from one another and to cause enmity. Truth then, is necessary if we seek peace, reconciliation, and fraternal love with one another. Yet in our culture today, there are many who reject truth outright. Others are confused or unsure where truth can be found. Some think that there is more than one ‘truth’ — there is for example your truth and my truth.

Last year the Synod of Ukrainian Greek Catholics Bishops issued a letter on the topic of war and just peace in the context of new ideologies titled “Rescue the victims from the hand of their oppressors” (Jer. 22:3). I quote “The tools used by the tyrants of the twentieth century have evolved radically in recent decades; cultural communication and technologies have improved by many levels. Moscow effectively uses the achievements of information technology, including social media. The digital revolution to some extent helps Russian propaganda to create a different, virtual reality that is radically different from actual reality and, what is more, distorts it. With its practical actions, production of fakes and postulation of post-truth, modern Russian propaganda makes use of some of the most radical movements of philosophical postmodernism from the end of the last century, which denied the existence of objective and verifiable truth and claimed that there are no natural foundations of morality and law”.

But it is not only russia that distorts and manipulates what is objectively true, as recent events have shown us.

But as Christians, as believers in the One true God who reveals himself to us in the person of his Son Jesus Christ, we know that truth is real and that without it we can make no sense of our lives. If we cling to falsehood or entertain ideas that are not grounded in reality, we live like people surrounded by darkness.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus famously tells his disciples “I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to Father but by me” (Jn 14:6). We witness a very important detail about truth in this passage. Namely that truth is not mere opinion, or a set of teachings, or something only in our minds, but something much more real: it is a person. We find truth only when we experience it in the form of Jesus. To know truth, we must know Him.

And so, the first step in recognising truth is by meeting Jesus. But the truth that Jesus offers to us in his person is one that is bold and courageous. It is a truth that stares down evil and shines a light on falsehoods and lies. It is not a truth that guarantees us comfort or an easy life, aligning ourselves with truth doesn’t mean we will not suffer or experience pain or hardship. When Jesus was brought before Pilate to give an account of who he was and the claims he had made, he told the Roman governor that he was indeed a king yet that his kingship was not of the worldly type and that he came into the world to bear witness to the truth (Jn 18:28–40). As we all know, Pilate’s response to this was to ask the question “what is truth?” As if to say, what is this thing you speak of and why does it matter when I have the power over your life. But Jesus gave us the example of witnessing to truth no matter the personal cost.

The martyrs of our faith remind us of this every day: that sometimes we will face persecution and even death because we choose truth.

Considering this, how does truth give us peace? It is an important question. But to answer this we need a richer understanding of peace. Of course, peace as it relates to physical safety and the absence of war is fundamental to the Christian life. To love is to ‘will the good of the other’, to place one’s neighbour first, to serve and if need be, to lay down one’s life. We cannot be Christians and support violence or aggression. But peace is more than just the absence of war and violence. Peace is something that begins in the human heart, it is tied to the interior life. We can be at war with ourselves, and sin is a type of spiritual violence. It is in this sense then that Jesus offers us Himself as both truth and peace.

We might recall here the story of the road to Emmaus. Two of Jesus disciples were in state of confusion following the events they had just witnessed (Lk 24:13–35). They were discussing how their leader whom they thought to be the messiah had been greeting enthusiastically by the people in Jerusalem but within days had been rejected and crucified. How his tomb was found empty; and how the women had seen angels declaring him to be alive. In other words, they were trying to make sense of everything, to find out what was true and what wasn’t. Only when they are joined on their journey by a teacher who was able to explain everything to them, to point them towards the truth, they were able to start to piece it all together. But it was not until this visitor on the journey made himself fully known by the breaking of the bread, the Eucharistic celebration, that they came face to face with truth. That is, when they have Jesus in front of them, they experience the fullness of truth and in turn the fullness of peace.

Through his sacrifice on the cross, when he took on all of human sin, Jesus opened the door for us to his divine peace. This is the truth we must proclaim if we are to advocate for peace. We must first accept the peace of Christ that comes when we turn to him, when we give our lives to him, when we repent from sin and the destruction it causes and instead move towards Him, who is the way the truth and the life.

Only the peace of Christ, grounded in the truth of his person, can replace selfishness, ego, the sense of superiority which is so often the stumbling blocks to peace. Only his truth is capable of making us humble and reliant upon God. Only his truth allows us to recognise the inherent dignity of each human person made in his image and likeness (Gen 1:27); and that in him there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female (Gal 3:28). When we allow ourselves to be transformed by his truth and peace, we live as his sons and daughters, children of the Most High.

As his children, we are called to go out and bring his peace to others by loving them as he loves us. This is the heart of Catholic Social Teaching. When we carry out acts of mercy, justice, and outreach by serving those in our society who are most in need, we live out his peace. But this must always be coupled with his truth. We must always lead with the promise that Christ leads us to a new form of life, not only one that looks after our temporal needs, but more importantly one that looks forward to the spiritual glory that awaits us in the age to come.

And so, my dear friends, in the sacrificial work that you do in serving all of God’s people, always proclaim his truth and the everlasting peace that it brings. This is the Good News, that the God so loved the world he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (Jn 3:16). In this way you will bring them the greatest of gifts, the gift of peace that transforms hearts and minds, and that contributes to building up of God’s kingdom here and now and looks forward to the heavenly banquet.

For this I pray: God of peace and truth, your prophet Isaiah promised swords would be turned into ploughshares, and your Son’s mother, Mary, proclaimed the mighty would be put down and the humble exalted: visit those nations who are at war; deliver them from fear, violence, attack, injury, destruction, death; and give them courage, solidarity and allies in their hour of vulnerability and sorrow.

Turn the hearts of those bent on war and invasion. Strengthen the hand of all seeking to halt conflict, restore order, and pursue justice and truth.

Make this moment of peril an occasion for your Holy Spirit to show your world the cost of conflict and our dependence on one another. In Christ our Lord, who is our peace. Amen.