Archbishop Cordileone’s Vision: Honor Martyrs of Communism With Music, Art and Literature

On my porch last January, I found a bulky, wet, disintegrating brown envelope. As I moved to open it, the paper simply gave way, exposing a messy assortment of books, booklets and old mimeographed pages about the Catholic martyrs of Ukraine. These were sent by Father Andrew Summerson, a Toronto Byzantine Catholic priest, to help me fulfill an unusual commission from San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone: Create the text of a new hymn (with the music composed by Frank La Rocca) honoring the heroic witness of Ukraine’s martyrs and white martyrs.