(In the cellar of a Kyiv kindergarten, children take shelter during an air raid | Genya SAVILOV / AFP via Getty)
In my twenty-five years as a teacher and executive at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), various events have been worthy of international attention, but none like the surreal present. The country today often seems like the setting of a World War II film with all the usual paradoxes. Cafés are open with music in the air, and spring brings couples holding hands out to the street. But half the flowers people are buying here in Lviv are for the constant funerals at the baroque Church of St. Peter and Paul. It has been the military chapel since Austrian times, except of course when the Soviets shuttered it and used it for a book depository. The dozen priests and seminarians there are all graduates or students of UCU and members of what is locally called the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, an eastern-rite church with about five million members and three thousand priests.
