America’s moral crisis, isolationism and the war in Ukraine

Special correspondent in Philadelphia

At the beginning of November, we accompany Archbishop Borys Gudziak, a key figure in the Ukrainian Catholic Church and a great defender of the Ukrainian cause in America, to the Greek-Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Philadelphia. In this magnificent place built in 1920, decorated by a Ukrainian-American artist who spent her life painting its frescoes, as well as those of nearly eighty other churches, the toxic tumults of the presidential campaign and the daily insults that there fuse between candidates seem distant.

« I wanted to show you all this beauty before we tackle darker subjects », smiled the clergyman, who was a student of the legendary Cardinal Jozef Slipyj in Rome and has a doctorate in cultural history from Harvard University. He says that, in the 1960s, the Ukrainian-American community of this diocese numbered nearly 100,000 flock, compared to 10,000…