From Ukraine with love—Father Yuriy Shchurko joins the institute as visiting professor of the practice

From Ukraine with love

Father Yuriy Shchurko joins the institute as visiting professor of the practice

February 24, 2025

“Don’t be alarmed when you meet my wife and our kids,” Rev. Yuriy Shchurko, visiting professor of the practice at the Institute for Social Concerns, joked as he introduced himself to the staff. “I’m from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Priests are allowed to marry.” Father Shchurko joins the institute for the spring 2025 semester by a selective invitation to aligned visiting scholars to provide opportunities for scholarly conversations and target unique chances to enrich the institute’s course offerings.

*Rev. Yuriy Shchurko, center, speaks with Felicia Johnson O’Brien and Ryan Juskus*

An affable and gregarious priest of the Sambir-Drohobych Eparchy and father of four, Father Shchurko is also a biblical scholar by training. In 2016 he founded the Department of Biblical Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), where he serves as dean of the faculty of philosophy and theology. He also created and maintains a popular website called Zhyty Slovom (To Live by the Word) that includes regular biblical reflections and a podcast on Scripture.

Everything changed for Shchurko on February 24, 2022, with the full-scale invasion of his country. He immediately wrote on his website, “Satan has openly shown his face.” He added, “Therefore, the mission of our generation is to not allow this abomination to overwhelm our country but to save our loved ones from this abomination of desolation.”

“Many of us find it difficult to get used to the idea that we have a full-scale war, that all this is really happening,” he wrote at the end of that first day of war. “However, this is a normal reaction of mentally healthy people. Father Alexander Men said that it is impossible to understand evil because evil is senseless; it is illogical. Father Alexander said that to understand evil means to make it justified, to prove the need for its existence.”

Rather than try to make sense of evil, Shchurko returned to Scripture with a renewed sense of urgency to understand how God’s people are called to respond to it. Within the first weeks of the war, he wrote 30 short essays on biblical topics like what Jesus did and didn’t mean by his command in the Sermon on the Mount to turn the other cheek. These reflections were also shaped by his personal experience of senseless tragedy: In 2008, his daughter Andreana Sophia was killed by a drunk driver on her walk home from church.

*Father Yuriy Shchurko, right, with wife and three of their kids at University Church of the Holy Wisdom of God, Ukrainian Catholic University*

Father Shchurko’s pursuit of justice led him to engage not only Scripture but also Catholic social teaching (CST). This research led to a 2022-23 ND-UCU Faculty Collaboration Grant through Notre Dame Global on a project titled “Principles of a just war and just peace in the context of Russian aggression in Ukraine.” Now a visiting scholar at both the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Institute for Social Concerns as part of Notre Dame’s ongoing partnership with UCU, he is focusing this research on how the realities on the ground in Ukraine should inform and even potentially modify the Church’s teaching on war and peace.

Given Shchurko’s research on CST, the Institute for Social Concerns made a natural collaborator. “We are thrilled to partner with the Nanovic Institute to bring Father Shchurko to the University,” said Suzanne Shanahan, Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director of the institute. “Not only is his research on justice for Ukraine at the heart of our work at the institute, but we have also enjoyed the addition of a priest to our lively faculty hallway.”

Shchurko’s academic journey began with a master’s in theology from Lviv Holy Spirit Seminary and Lviv Theological Academy (now UCU) in 2001. He went on to earn a licentiate in sacred theology (STL) from the University of Opole, Poland (2007), and a doctorate in sacred theology (STD/Ph.D.) in biblical theology (2010), with a dissertation focusing on linguistic-exegetical analysis of Luke’s Gospel. From 2013 to 2016, he researched at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany.

Father Shchurko expressed gratitude to the institute for giving him a place to pursue his research on justice for Ukraine—especially a place so close to the Hesburgh Library. He also expressed appreciation for “the atmosphere in the institute,” stating, “All the professors whom I’ve met here at the institute, starting with Suzanne, are responsive and ready to help—making suggestions for the course or the topic I’m writing on. They are very open and supportive.”

This semester at the institute, Shchurko is teaching the course Just Peace: A Case Study on Ukraine, while researching for a book on the topic, tentatively titled, Just Peace and Ukraine: Undying Hope. In the face of tragedy and evil, he writes with love for his people and the desire to inspire in them an undying hope that peace and justice will prevail.