Fr Zdzislaw on the Dominican Work in Ukraine, Hope, and Action

‘It is important not to say: “this is not our war”‘.

In an interview posted to YouTube, the Las Casas Institute sat down with Fr Zdzislaw Szmanda, the director of the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute of Religious Sciences in Kyiv. We discussed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the impact on the Ukrainian people, and what we, as Dominicans and Catholics, can do. Fr Zdzislaw Szmanda joined the Order of Preachers in 1992. He holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Poznan. He also studied theology in Kraków and in Fribourg, Switzerland, where he earned a doctorate in Church history. From 2009 to 2011, he served as a lecturer and deputy director of the St. Thomas Institute, and he has served as pastoral caretaker at the Dominican parish of St. Paul in Geneva, from where he returned to Kyiv.

This interview followed a visit to Ukraine by Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, and you can read more about his visit in a Lenten update written by Jaroslaw Krawiec OP.

He was interviewed by the Dr Richard Finn, former director of the Las Casas Institute, and Dr John Angus Macaulay, the institute’s administrator.