People who do not rise to the occasion tend to be lost to history, their failings or silence leaving no mark. They are not necessarily bad people. They go with the flow, or let the flow overwhelm them.
Sometimes, however, people do rise to the occasion; they accurately assess a difficult situation, and they raise their voice. They lead. Archbishop Borys Gudziak, of the Ukrainian Archeparchy of Philadelphia, is such a man.
Last week, when the Trump administration moved to disband the Voice of America, Gudziak posted a statement on Facebook. “For decades repressed peoples could count on the VOA to provide accurate information about American and world affairs. Information to them denied, information forbidden,” Gudziak rightly said.
Anyone who has had cousins who lived behind the Iron Curtain or in other places where authoritarians and autocrats carefully managed a party line knows the truth of the archbishop’s comments.
Gudziak did not merely give a shoutout to the now-unemployed journalists who lost their jobs. He captured the moral failure that led to the shuttering of VOA.
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With thanks to the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) and Michael Sean Winters, where this article originally appeared.
