(RNS) — Days after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, leaders of the Chemin Neuf Catholic Community outside Warsaw, Poland, got a call asking if it could take in a group of Ukrainian refugees.
The call came from a bus driver whose route usually took him between Warsaw and the Polish village of Mistow. But on that day he’d driven about 200 miles to Poland’s border with Ukraine, where nearly 2 million Ukrainians have arrived in recent weeks seeking safety from Russian attacks.
He had a bus full of Ukrainian women and children, he told the leaders of Chemin Neuf, and he wasn’t sure where else to go.
“For us it was really the Lord’s call to care for the least of these,” said the Rev. Marcin Borządek, who pastors Our Lady of Fatima, the small parish church the community leads in Mistow.
In a text message to Religion News Service, Borządek pointed to Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Matthew: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
Since then, the Chemin Neuf Catholic Community has grown from one priest and two Catholic sisters to a household of 30, including 12 women and 15 children between the ages of 2 months and 15 years old.
Altogether the community house has sheltered as many as 50 people in the last few weeks, the priest said — Orthodox and Baptist, mothers and grandmothers whose husbands have stayed to fight, frightened children who arrived on a bus at 4 a.m. after 30 hours of travel.
The first child who came to them, Borządek said, was shoeless and offered him a piece of chocolate. He wept when he saw her.
The most recent joined them last week — a 15-year-old girl who is five months’ pregnant.
More than 3 million people total have fled the war in Ukraine into neighboring countries, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency, pouring over the borders of Poland, Romania, Moldova, Hungary and Slovakia. Many more need humanitarian assistance or have been displaced within Ukraine.
Ukrainian refugees share a meal at the the Chemin Neuf Catholic Community in Mistow, Poland. Photo courtesy of the Rev. Marcin Borządek
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, head of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, described it as the “fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War 2.”
Refugee resettlement agencies in the United States — many of them faith-based, like LIRS — are reaching out to help partners working in Ukraine and its neighboring countries. They’re also working to resettle Ukrainians who already had applied to reconnect with family in the U.S. under existing laws.
As the numbers increase, agency leaders are calling on the U.S. to do more.
“Countries beyond those neighboring nations — like Lithuania, Israel, the U.K. — are now accepting significant numbers of refugees, and I think that reflects an important growing dynamic, which is every nation able needs to play a part,” Vignarajah said.
“We certainly believe that the United States needs to continue to exercise its global humanitarian leadership.”
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah. Photo courtesy of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service
LIRS is urging the U.S. to speed up efforts to rebuild its refugee resettlement system after years of cuts made by former President Donald Trump. That work already has begun: President Joe Biden has directed the U.S. to resettle as many as 125,000 refugees in the current fiscal year, though it had only resettled about 6,500 between November 2021 and the end of February 2022.
It also is recommending the U.S. expedite the process for Ukrainians who have applied for reunification with family through an existing program under the Lautenberg Amendment. Let them to come to the U.S. first, Vignarajah said, then finish their processing.
