Video-message of His Beatitude Sviatoslav. July 9 136 th day of the war

Today is Saturday 9 July 2022 and Ukraine is already experiencing the 136th day of nationwide resistance to Russian aggression.

We thank the Lord God and the Armed Forces of Ukraine that we are alive, can see this morning light, and can stand in prayer before the face of God.

The last day was difficult, marked by many casualties among the civilian population. The enemy actively attacked Ukraine, in particular in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. Last night, very active missile strikes were carried out on cities in the south of Ukraine. Kryvyi Rih shuddered from Russian missiles, explosions from rockets could be heard in Mykolayiv, and the enemy again bombarded Dnipropetrovsk region with its cruise missiles. Unfortunately, many people have died and there are many injured.

But Ukraine is standing. Ukraine is fighting. The Ukrainian army is trying to push the enemy out of the territory in the south of our homeland, in particular in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. Today, we want every Ukrainian, wherever they live on the face of this earth, to be moved by the pain and suffering of those who suffer directly from the war. Because it is our compassion that truly makes us Christians and makes us real people.

Today we continue our contemplation, looking for wisdom in the experience of the Church to overcome, to overcome evil, to triumph over the devil. And today I would like to reflect on one more of the so-called 8 deadly sins. They are the main ones, because they give birth to many other sins, and when we manage to overcome them, then we will be freed from many other defects of our spiritual attitude.

Today, let us reflect on the nature and content of the sin of fornication, and therefore on the virtue of chastity, which is the victory over this dangerous calamity. The Lord God created the person and called them to love, gave them all the physical, mental, and spiritual powers in order to be capable of love. When a person loves, he or she enlivens everything around them. When they love, they even participate in the mystery of the birth of a new human life. Therefore, it can be said that sexual desire is natural for a person, but the essence of the sin of fornication is that, because of passion, because of sin, this need of a person, this gift of a person to love and be loved becomes disoriented and disordered.
The sin of fornication consists in a disordered constant search for sexual pleasure. And it becomes very dangerous, because when we do not see another person as someone who can and should be loved, we reduce them to the object of our lust. And the sin of fornication destroys a person's ability to love, makes them deeply unhappy, lost in their own lust, and makes them a slave to sin, and reduces another person to the level of a commodity, an object of pleasure. Human sexuality, which is a call to love, is turned into a commodity to be sold or bought.

This passion is dangerous not only for the body, but also for the soul, because it deeply enslaves a person and leads to the reversal of human relations as such. Saint Cyril of Jerusalem says the following: "Whoever believes that the body is destined for the resurrection takes care of these robes of his and does not pollute them with impurity, and whoever does not believe in the resurrection abandons them to the abyss of impurity and abuses them as something alien to themselves." Therefore, purity and wholeness—these are manifestations of our faith in the resurrection of the body, a manifestation of respect for human sexuality, and also a school of true, pure love.

Today I want to invite all of you to a special prayer for our youth, because it is on the shoulders of our youth that the main burden of this war has fallen. The flower of our nation is dying at the front, and tens, hundreds of thousands of children do not feel loved to the end, do not feel the love that is a necessary condition for their development, their maturation, their formation as people. Let us pray today for our youth, let us wrap with the love of our prayer all those who suffer today in the midst of the sea of ​​hatred in this terrible war.

O God, bless Ukraine. O God, teach us to love, teach us pure love for the land, as our prayer-hymn "Great and only God" [Bozhe velykiy, yedyniy] teaches us. O God, give us this universal virtue, with which we can defeat the demon of debauchery, which today turns human sexuality even into a weapon of humiliation in Ukraine. O God, bless the children of the Ukrainian land.

May the blessing of the Lord be upon you through His grace and love of humankind, always, now and ever, and for ages of ages. Amen. 

Glory to Jesus Christ!