CRACOW. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees have passed through this ancient cultural capital of Poland since Vladimir Putin’s poorly equipped, miserably led, and brutish army invaded Ukraine on February 24 on the spurious pretext that a “Nazi”-led Ukraine posed an existential threat to Russia’s security. The bloodlands of eastern Europe, between here and the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, are no stranger to totalitarian cruelty and its effects. Between 1932 (the beginning of Stalin’s terror-famine, the Ukrainian Holodomor) and 1945 (the end of World War II), this was the most dangerous part of the world, a blood-soaked killing field in which perhaps 20 million men, women, and children died violent deaths.

Barbaric warfare inevitably causes a massive stream of refugees fleeing the slaughter, and the barbaric Russian warfare of 2022 is no exception. What is different—and what is heartening, in this season of discouragement over the state of world affairs and the Catholic Church’s response to it—is how the millions of Ukrainian refugees who fled Putin’s war have been treated. That difference was brought home to me, graphically, in a conversation I had with a distinguished Polish particle astrophysicist.