On 23 June 1968, during the 'Prague Spring', Vlk was ordained a priest. In 1978, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia revoked his state authorization to exercise his priestly ministry. Vlk was then forced to live underground, toiling for years as a window-cleaner in downtown Prague....
Landsbergis was the first head of state of Lithuania after its independence from the Soviet Union, and served as the Head of the Lithuanian Parliament Seimas. He went on to serve as Member of the European Parliament for Lithuania from 2004-2010. He is a founding...
Allen served as the United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1982, and had been Reagan's chief foreign policy advisor since 1977. He has been a fellow of the Hoover Institution since 1983. He is a past member of the...
His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk has served as the Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church since 25 March 2011. He was ordained a priest in 1994 and later worked as head of the secretariat of Patriarch Lubomyr Husar. Shevchuk is an alumnus of the...
Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the WASHINGTON POST and SLATE. She directs the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute in London and is an adjunct fellow of the Center for European Policy Analysis. From 1988-1991 she covered the collapse of communism as the Warsaw correspondent...
Norman Davies is a leading scholar on Polish history who is widely regarded as one of the preeminent historians of Central and Eastern European history. From 1971-1996 Davies taught Polish history at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of University College, London. He...
Fr. Maciej Zięba was a close associate of Pope John Paul II and a leading activist in Poland’s Solidarity movement in the Communist era. He is the founder and Director of the Tertio Millenio Institute, an influential NGO in Poland that promotes the social teachings...
Archbishop Mokrzycki is a native of Poland and has been archbishop of Lviv since 2008. As a monsignor, he was a personal secretary to Pope John Paul II from 1996 until the pope’s death in 2005. He continued as a personal secretary to Pope Benedict...
On April 5, 2013 Pope Francis appointed Grusas Archbishop of Vilnius. Born in Washington in 1961, His parents were separated by World War II and, after 16 years of being caught behind the Iron Curtain, his mother and 17-year-old sister were among just 200 families...
Andrzej Gwiazda participated in the student protests against the Polish government in 1968 as well as the December 1970 demonstrations that were sparked by sudden increases in food prices. He was a member of the Presiding Committee of the Strike at Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyard in...