And through all of this, the character of the Maidan movement evolved. What had begun in protest at Yanukovych's rejection of the EU became something more, something different, something nobler: a movement of national civic renewal, concerned about politics to be sure, but concerned in the first instance about a defence of human dignity in a morally-grounded renewal of public life. Established democracies often use the term "the public square" glibly, as if that essential civic space for democratic politics were, somehow, self-constituting. The people of the Maidan movement knew better. Having experienced the deep corruption of public life under the Yanukovych regime, they knew that any "public square" capable of sustaining the civil society institutions essential to democracy and free politics had to be self-consciously built on the foundation of civic virtues. Those virtues could not be taken for granted. They had to be constantly nurtured — even with personal sacrifice. Freedom, the Maidan movement reminded the world, is never free.

Over the past decade, those with eyes to see could glimpse a hint of the national movement of moral and civil renewal that Maidan became, in one of Ukraine's most striking new institutions: the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.

Prior to World War II, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), led by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, was one of the principal factors in the development of contemporary Ukrainian national consciousness. That was why, in 1946, the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB and successor to the Cheka) liquidated the UGCC through the mechanism of a contrived church council, the "Lviv Sobor". This abrogated at gunpoint the 1596 Union of Brest (which had brought certain Orthodox jurisdictions into communion with Rome), "reunited" Ukrainian Greek Catholics with Russian Orthodoxy, and declared the UGCC illegal. Many of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops, priests, nuns and laity who refused to bow to this coercion were martyred, and the UGCC became, until 1990, the largest underground religious body in the world: its liturgies, schools, and seminaries conducted in forests, its people tenaciously holding onto their faith in whatever privacy they were permitted under Soviet Communism.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky's successor, Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj (the model for the "pope from the steppes" in Morris West's novel, The Shoes of the Fisherman), was released from the Gulag in 1963 and sent in a sealed train to Rome, where he spent the rest of his life. There, he reconstituted the Lviv Theological Academy, where he had once taught, as the seed from which Sheptytsky's dream of a Ukrainian Catholic University might be realised in a free Ukraine. Slipyj and his successors found the perfect instrument for this purpose in Borys Gudziak, an American of Ukrainian stock with a Harvard doctorate in history and a deeply Catholic passion for higher education that forms the whole person, not just the intellect. Thus, after the Soviet crack-up of 1991, the Ukrainian Catholic University, the only Catholic institution of higher learning in the former Soviet space, was born, and is now one of the two most respected universities in Ukraine.

From the beginning, UCU has been dedicated to training leaders who can help rebuild the shattered public culture of Ukraine: a "culture without trust" as university president Gudziak (he became bishop in 2012) often puts it. UCU is being built on a tract of land that opens out to Lviv in a kind of architectural embrace, inviting people of all faiths and no faith to enter and explore the truths essential to genuine civil society and authentic democracy. Its residence halls include small communities built on the model of the L'Arche Communities of Jean Vanier, in which students and faculty interact every day with developmentally-handicapped adults, usually men and women with Down's Syndrome — innocents who, as Gudziak puts it, trust you and whom you cannot not trust. The university's commitment to classic liberal arts education in the humanities is complemented by courses for entrepreneurs and managers that stress business ethics — a revolutionary discipline in a country that is far more oligarchy than true free market. And its chapel, when completed, will include elements of both Western and Eastern Christian art and design, underscoring the university's ecumenical commitment and Ukraine's position as connecting tissue between what John Paul II used to call Europe's "two lungs".