The Struggle to Stay Human

Imprisoned as an opponent of communism, Nicu Steinhardt, a Romanian Jew, crowns his dream of being baptized clandestinely by an Orthodox priest, assisted by two Catholic priests, two Uniates, and a Protestant, so that the sacrament would bear an ecumenical imprint. In the Journal of Happiness (the title is his life program), written in prison between 1958 and 1971, there is a list of advice on how to resist hatred without straying from the Christian path. «Do not take life tragically. Step out of oneself, without thinking of us. Be insensitive to the things of the world. Consider happiness as a duty, knowing that the first duty of a Christian is to know how to suffer. Be courageous and bold, gentle and humble of heart. Do not use the sword, aware of belonging to One who came not to bring peace on earth, but the sword and fire. Be always ready to offer one's life. Have eternal life as the ultimate goal and preserve the modest condition of the struggling man». This is the path for every Christian who wants to keep their eyes fixed straight on Jesus: holding all these interior dispositions together, never one without the other.

Steinhardt's “ecumenical” baptism reminds us that certain Eastern European countries like Romania, Poland, and Ukraine experienced the dramatic conflict between two Christian confessions, Orthodox and Greek Catholic—the latter often contemptuously called “Uniate”: that part of the Orthodox Church which at the end of the 16th century, with the Council of Brest, chose to enter into full communion with the Church of Rome while preserving the Byzantine rite. The trials of the Ukrainian people in the 20th century are staggering: 17 million dead due to wars, famines, and the extermination of the Jews; the famine planned by Stalin in 1931 alone cost 7 million lives, with documented instances of cannibalism. One in ten Ukrainians was deported to Siberia. Finally, the suffering of the Greek Catholic Church, never recognized by Moscow, for which from a canonical standpoint only the 1946 Synod of Lviv remained valid, through which Stalin forced the “Uniates” to merge with Orthodoxy.

After the collapse of communism, the drama of Greek Catholic church buildings occupied by the Orthodox and the struggle to reclaim them ensued. The «Great Russian Catastrophe of the 1990s», as Solzhenitsyn called it. Yet, out of that catastrophe bloomed the lives of two holy metropolitans: Andrey Sheptytsky, who in that context knew how to refound monastic life, reform the liturgy, and weave relations with the Orthodox; and his successor Josyf Slipyj, who spent 39 years in Soviet gulags, leaving everyone, atheists and Orthodox alike, with the memory of a man of God. Of him, the Rabbi of Lviv said: «We do not believe in saints, but if there is one, the first is Metropolitan Andrey». Liberation from hatred lies solely within the spiritual struggle, the only path of life for the persecuted. Leaping back through the centuries to the 7th, we find Saint Maximus the Confessor, a martyr for defending the divine-human nature of Christ—the very root and cause of the struggle. He used to say: we exist thanks to love; loving is our natural state. But we have replaced the love of God with self-love, subverting the order of nature. The persecution is within ourselves, if we are capable of seeing. We have nothing but the struggle to re-learn how to love, to try to become human again and let the love of God take possession of our entire being, transforming every shred of hatred into the boundless love of God.

Flaminia Morandi
NP February 2026