During the bombing of Kyiv on Friday evening, during the third day of the war in Ukraine, a baby girl named Mia was born in a bomb shelter. Her birth took place under the most difficult conditions possible, a time of great anxiety and fear, but in her first moments of life she offered to those taking shelter from the attack light and hope.
The Ukrainian activist Hanna Hopko informed the world about these miraculous births on Twitter.
“When Putin kills Ukrainians, we call on mothers from Russia and Belarus to protest against the Russian war in Ukraine,” she wrote, using this situation to appeal for unity.
She also said that the baby is safe and sound, and the mother is happy after the difficult birth.
The message, a symbolic triumph of life over death, was also sent by the Nexta agency, informing that the baby girl was born in the Kyiv subway, which currently serves as a bomb shelter.
John Paul II and the Gospel of Life
Meditating on the conflict between the woman and the dragon in the book of Revelation, St. John Paul II offers a beautiful spiritual meditation at the conclusion of his encyclcial letter Evangelium Vitae.
Mary thus helps the Church to realize that life is always at the centre of a great struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness. The dragon wishes to devour “the child brought forth” (cf. Rev 12:4), a figure of Christ, whom Mary brought forth “in the fullness of time” (Gal 4:4) and whom the Church must unceasingly offer to people in every age. But in a way that child is also a figure of every person, every child, especially every helpless baby whose life is threatened, because-as the Council reminds us-“by his Incarnation the Son of God has united himself in some fashion with every person.” It is precisely in the “flesh” of every person that Christ continues to reveal himself and to enter into fellowship with us, so that rejection of human life, in whatever form that rejection takes, is really a rejection of Christ.
The child in the book of Revelation, born at a moment of strife and crisis, calls to mind every suffering mother who, seemingly against all hope, brings life to the world.
May the scourge of war be driven from Kyiv, that every life may be treated as sacred.
And today we celebrate...