Hana served as the prime minister of Poland between 8 July 1992 and 26 October 1993 under the presidency of Lech Wałęsa. She is the first (and, so far, the only) woman to hold this post in Poland and was the 14th woman to be...
As a young man, Adamkus joined the underground against the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940. During World War II, his family fled Lithuania in order to avoid the second Soviet occupation in 1944. He attended the University of Munich in Germany before moving to...
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz was a long-time and influential aide to Pope John Paul II. When Cardinal Wojtyła of Krakow was elected Pope in 1978 he appointed Msgr. Dziwisz as his personal secretary; a position he held until the death of the Pope in 2005. Dziwisz...
Carl A. Anderson is the chief executive officer and chairman of the board of the Knights of Columbus, the world’s largest organization of Catholic laymen with more than 1.9 million members. He was a close collaborator of St. John Paul II since the early 1980s....
George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and official biographer of John Paul II. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. His work Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II...
Polish-American political scientist and statesman who served as a United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981.Brzezinski is currently Robert E. Osgood Professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the...
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...
A former student and close personal friend of Pope John Paul II, Grygiel has served as vice president of the central session of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family, located at the Pontifical Lateran University, where he holds the...
Joaquín Navarro-Valls was the Director of the Holy See Press Office from 1984-2006. His role as the press liaison between the Vatican and the world press corps gave him perhaps the highest visibility of any one person in the Vatican outside of the Pope himself....
O’Sullivan is the author of the critically acclaimed work The Pope, The President and the Prime Minister that shed extraordinary new light on the intricate role played by Regan, Thatcher and John Paul II in the fall of communism. O‘Sullivan is the former editor of...
Monsignor Slawomir Oder was one of the first Polish priests ordained after the collapse of communism in 1989, making him a true beneficiary of Pope John Paul II’s courageous anti-Soviet efforts. Since September 2001 he has been Judicial Vicar of the Appellation Tribunal of the...
Zaryn is a leading Polish historian and authority on the history of the Catholic Church in Poland during the 20th Century. A prolific author, Zaryn is a former democratic activist who was arrested and imprisoned by the communist regime in 1982....
Andrzej Grajewski is Polish political scientist, and member of the College of the Institute of National Remembrance (1999-2006). An active member of Solidarity, Grajewski was involved in underground communications and providing aid to the interned and their families following the imposition of martial law in...
Nowak was employed at the Lenin Steel mill from 1969 to 1985. In 1980, he joined Solidarity After the introduction of martial law, he was initially living in hiding, a month later he was arrested and sentenced by a military court to 3 1/2 year...
Ligia was a close collaborator with Solidarity chaplain Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko. In November 1981 she was viciously beaten by “unknown attackers.” From December 1981 to February 1982 she lived in hiding. In June 1982 she was arrested and kept in custody for 2 weeks then...
Ewa Czaczkowska is a noted Polish historian, journalist, and founder of Areopag21.pl – a Catholic news service. Her biographies include Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński Saint Faustina, Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko....
Dr. Głębocki is a Professor of History at Poland’s leading Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He specializes in the history of Eastern Europe; and the policies of the former USSR towards its member states. He also writes and lectures extensively on Polish-Russian relations and the history...
Stawrowski is a Political philosopher, professor at the Institute of Political Science at Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University and the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is also the Co-founder and director of the Institute of Thought of Jozef Tischner in...
Marek Lasota is a historian working at the Institute of National Remembrance. Lasota authored the book Denouncing Wojtyla: Karol Wojtyla in Polish Communist Secret Service Records, the first comprehensive study of secret service records focusing on Karol Wojtyla, with documents dating from the period between...
Fellow, Yale University; and Former Head of External Relations, Ukrainian Orthodox Church....
Bogusław Sonik is a Polish politician and former Solidarity activist. Following the birth of Solidarity in 1980 he served as the vice-president of the Małopolska region of Solidarity until 1982. He was a regional delegate to the 1st National Assembly of the Independent Solidarity Trade...
Krzysztof Mazur is a noted young Polish intellectual specializing in the history of the Solidarity Movement and the thought of John Paul II. President of the Jagiellonian Club, a think tank in Kraków and lecturer at the Jagiellonian University. He also serves on the National...
Fr. Andriy is the Founding Director of the Sheptytsky Institute and is the Peter and Doris Kule Professor of Eastern Christian Theology and Spirituality. Fr. Andriy was ordained a Ukrainian Catholic priest by Patriarch Josyf Slipyj in Castelgandolfo, in 1980. On November 26, 2005 Fr....
Political scientist, lecturer at the Jagiellonian University, co-founder and longtime vice-president of the Tertio Millennio Institute in Kraków, director of The Center for Thought of John Paul II in Warsaw, chief of staff of the Polish Minister of Justice (2011-2013)....
Dr. Schindler is the Dean Emeritus and Edouard Cardinal Gagnon Professor of Fundamental Theology at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family at the Catholic University of America. Professor Schindler was appointed by Pope John Paul II as a consultor...
Political scientist and local government politician from Kraków, director of the Polish History Museum in Nowa Huta. She worked at the Prime Minister Department of the Foreign Affairs (1999-2002)....
Journalist and historian. Graduate of Columbia University and the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland....
Marek Benda is a Czech politician and member of the Civic Democratic Party. He is the son of Czech dissident Vaclav Benda....