Baltimore native Weigel honored for defense of human dignity in the face of aggression

American theologian and author George Weigel was honored Nov. 30 with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s Blessed Omelyan Kovch Award at the National Opera House in Lviv, Ukraine.

Blessed Kovch (1884-1944), who was beatified by St. John Paul II in 2001, was martyred in the concentration camp at Majdanek in German-occupied Poland, where he had been sent because of his work in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust. Father Kovch became known as the “Pastor of Majdanek”

Weigel — a Baltimore native and distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center — was recognized for “intellectual courage and witness to Christ in his defense of the dignity of the human person in the face of aggression and imperialism.”

The award’s committee, which also honored four other 2025 award laureates, thanked Weigel for extensive writings in support of Ukraine since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. That support, said the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, exemplified the truths about solidarity lived by Blessed Kovch, and it had resonated throughout the Catholic world.

Weigel, who participated in the award ceremony by Zoom from Rome, where he was teaching at the Angelicum, said he was “truly humbled by this award.”

“With its blood and treasure, Ukraine has taught the West that freedom is never free,” he said. “And because of that, the West owes Ukraine the support it needs and deserves.”

He added that the patron of the award is an inspiration to “promote true peace, freedom nobly lived, and justice for all today.”

Since the beginning of the war, Weigel has been a steadfast advocate of Ukraine’s freedom, reminding often of the remedies for freedom articulated decades ago by St. John Paul.

Speaking on Nov. 6, at Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw, Poland, the papal biographer and author of “Witness to Hope” told scholars from across the Atlantic that the late pope’s insistence on truth, moral culture and human dignity remains not only relevant but indispensable for a continent struggling to preserve its democratic soul.

Amid Russia’s war against Ukraine, heightened tensions along NATO’s eastern border, and widening political turmoil within parts of the European Union, questions about the future of Europe’s democratic stability have become increasingly urgent.

“The free society depends on a truth-based culture,” Weigel said. “If our politics are divisive and rancorous, it’s almost certainly because something is wrong with our public moral culture.”

The conference, which brought together academics from across Europe and the United States — including representatives from Ave Maria School of Law in Florida — examined the relevance of St. John Paul’s social and political teaching 20 years after his death. But Weigel made clear that the conversation is about far more than history and that the pope’s diagnosis that freedom without truth eventually collapses is more visible than ever.

When there’s only “your truth” against “my truth,” Weigel said, “persuasion loses; coercion wins” and “a relativistic public morality based on epistemological skepticism is imposed on all of society.”

He recalled St. John Paul’s 1995 address at the United Nations, in which the pope celebrated the courage of nations that had broken free from totalitarian rule and envisioned “a new springtime of the human spirit.”

But today, Weigel said, that springtime is threatened by an unmistakable “winter” of political and cultural instability.

Weigel emphasized St. John Paul’s view that Western civilization rests on three pillars: Jerusalem, Athens and Rome — symbols of biblical faith, confidence in reason and the rule of law.

“A loss of faith in the God of the Bible … seems to lead to a loss of faith in reason. And a loss of faith in reason is lethal to the democratic project, for argument based on reason and on the moral truths embedded in the world and in us is the lifeblood of democracy.”

He argued that Europe’s increasing detachment from these roots has left it ill-equipped to confront the challenges posed by authoritarian powers and by its own internal fragmentation.

Despite acknowledging the gravity of Europe’s current challenges, Weigel closed with a message of confidence rooted in the Christian virtue of hope.

“Politics, John Paul II knew, is always downstream from culture. If our politics are divisive and rancorous, it is almost certainly because something is wrong with our public moral culture,” the theologian said.

“Moral and cultural renewal — a recommitment to ‘living in the truth,’ which helped liberate east central Europe from communism — is thus an essential part of democratic renewal. Decadence and democracy cannot coexist indefinitely.”

He said the “public Church” envisioned by St. John Paul — “neither established nor partisan nor ghettoized — could play an important role here.”

This story was updated Dec. 2 at 8:32 a.m.

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