Dr. Paul Gavrilyuk holds the Aquinas Chair in Theology and Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota. He was born in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, where some members of his extended family remain today. As the situation in the country deteriorated, his elderly parents fled Ukraine and became refugees. In response to the immense humanitarian catastrophe now unfolding in the war-torn country, Gavrilyuk founded REBUILD UKRAINE, a non-profit organization that provides aid to refugees, delivers medical supplies and protective gear to civilian defense volunteers, and helps the children affected by the war. He will share with you how you can help rebuild Ukraine. For more info, visit rebuild-ua.org.

The following account of the icon exhibition that will be on display at the fundraiser was given by George Weigel in “The Dispatch” from July 3, 2019:

“Throughout the 20th century — the greatest period of martyrdom in history — persecuted Christians used the dross of this world to make religious artifacts.

Rosaries were constructed from bits and pieces of this-and-that. Crucifixes and Mass vessels were forged from scrap metal. Bibles and missals were handwritten on scraps of paper from memory. The Venerable Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan wore his pectoral cross suspended from a chain he made from the barbed wire of the Vietnamese communist concentration camp in which he was confined for years. Many such relics are displayed at the shrine of the New Martyrs in the Basilica of St. Bartholomew on Rome’s Tiber Island — a place where the usual bustle and buzz of Roman churches is replaced by a hushed reverence, as if even the least well-catechized visitors realize that they’re in the supernatural presence of great witnesses.

This deeply Catholic instinct for transforming what is dead or death-dealing into something life-affirming and life-giving continues today in Ukraine, through a remarkable project known as “The Icons on Ammo Boxes.”  Icons written on wood using various types of paint are nothing new, of course; many of the greatest icons in the history of Christian art were written that way. Oleksandr Klymenko’s brilliant idea was to use a different kind of wood: not a polished and treated panel, but the rough-hewn tops or bottoms of the boxes in bullets, grenades, and artillery shells were once stored. The icons he and Sofia Atlantova wrote, and which were displayed in Philadelphia, included wood from ammo boxes dating back to Soviet times. But they also included newer wood panels recycled from the battlefront of eastern Ukraine, where a Russian-led and Russian-financed war has been underway since 2014, taking over 10,000 lives, ruining the local economy, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.”

Exhibitions of the icons on ammo boxes, brought from the combat zone, have already been held at the European Parliament, Parliaments of Ukraine and Lithuania, St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, and the Lithuanian Embassy in Ukraine. The icons have been displayed in Antwerp, Berlin, Bloomington, Bonn, Catania, Chiaramonte Gulfi, Chicago, Edmonton, Frankfurt am Main, the Hague, Iași, Munich, Hanover, Leipzig, Lublin, Los Angeles, Milan, Montreal, Ottawa, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, Radomyshl, Rome, Toronto, Vienna, Warsaw, and Winnipeg, as well as the Ukrainian cities of Dnipro, Fastiv, Lutsk, Lviv, Mariupol, Kamyanske, and Pokrovsk. Exhibitions of the icons on ammo boxes were also part of the 25th Economic Forum in Krynica, Poland, and the 8th Kyiv Security Forum, and were held in the University of Alberta in Canada, the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, and the Superior Institute of Religious Sciences of St. Thomas Aquinas in Kyiv.