On Why We Chose Poland

People usually ask: why Poland, specifically? Why not Rome, or the Holy Land, or the Camino. The honest answer is that we lived there for three years, and it changed us in ways we're still working and living out.

But the better answer is this: Poland is a country that has been asked, repeatedly and at enormous cost, to choose between survival and integrity. It has chosen integrity — imperfectly, humanly, and many times magnificently, more times than any history book adequately captures.

The saints we encountered here — Kolbe, Popiełuszko, Faustina, John Paul II — are not exceptional people who lived in exceptional times. They are ordinary people who faced ordinary temptations to look away, to comply, to keep their heads down. And they didn't.

That story is not a Polish story. It is a human story. And it is as alive today as it was in 1941, or 1984.

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