An extremely informative lecture byFather Borys Gudziak took place at St. John the Beloved Roman Catholic Parish in McLean, Virginia and provided a wonderful background of hundreds of years of Ukrainian history, the interrelationships of faiths, the time that Ukrainian Catholics spent in the catacombs due to the malevolent repression of the Kremlin, as well as the critical role of faith in the holding together Ukrainian culture during the Soviet period and its fundamental importance to the rebuilding of civil society in Ukraine.

Father Gudziak was born in 1960 in Syracuse, New York, to Ukrainian immigrant parents. He was a seminarian in Rome, then earned a doctorate in history from Harvard University. With the fall of the Soviet Union, he moved to Ukraine where he helped revive the Lviv Theological Academy, now Ukrainian Catholic University. He has been rector there since 2000.