The last day of 2020 bore sad news – after a long struggle with cancer, Fr. Maciej Zięba, O.P., died in Wrocław, Poland. Ukraine, the Ukrainian Catholic University, and I, personally, lost a good friend. Poland, and the Church in Poland, lost one of the significant figures in their pilgrimage from fear to dignity.
Maciej Zięba was a priest, a Dominican monk, a physicist, a theologian, a philosopher, a public intellectual, and a member of Solidarność (Solidarity). But he was first of all a human being. The kind of human being that His Beatitude the late Lubomyr Husar often spoke of to us. I remember Maciej, who belonged to the younger cohort of the wide circle of collaborators of Pope St. John Paul II, as smiling, humane, unbelievably hard-working, and open.