Dr. Damian Fedoryka will be remembered and treasured with deep gratitude

On Wednesday, around 3:00 pm, there may be a traffic jam downtown because an hour earlier at St John the Baptist Church will have been the final farewell to a remarkable man, Dr. Damian Fedoryka. His extraordinary life was a connection here in Front Royal to a piece of history we don’t usually think about.

Damian Fedoryka was born in the Carpathian Mountains of Western Ukraine on November 2, 1940. By the time he was four, his father was in Auschwitz concentration camp. His mother could tell that the Russian occupation was inevitable, so she fled with Damian, his sister Marta, and baby brother Leo. His brother Leo “Levko” died in their walk to freedom from dysentery and was buried in a field by a farmer’s house. The trauma burned the memory into Damian’s mind, and years later, he returned to the same spot with some of his own children to finally complete the grieving process. When the war ended, the family was reunited in a Displaced Persons camp outside of Regensburg, Germany.

In 1948 they arrived in the United States, where Damian cleaned the poop out of their first home: a re-purposed chicken coop in someone’s back yard. The Catholic education system was still strong in those days, so the children were able to attend Catholic schools. They were in Mahwah, New Jersey, by the time Damian got a scholarship to Regis High School in New York City, and for four years, he rode the train an hour each way to attend. After high school, he got another scholarship to the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. There, he and other poor students lived with an old Ukrainian priest whose kindness he remembered his whole life.

After college, like the good American he was, Damian joined the Army and became a second lieutenant. The night before he was going to accept a permanent commission and deploy to Vietnam, he went to a dance at a Ukrainian community in New York City and met Irene Kondra, so he decided to stay in New York and pursue a Master’s Degree in Philosophy at Fordham University, and then a Ph.D. in Salzburg, Germany. He and Irene were married in 1966 and went on to have ten children. She died in 2010.

He taught at the University of Rhode Island and the University of Dallas, and in 1985_ he became President of Christendom College here in Front Royal. It was under his leadership that Christendom retired its earlier debt, built two new residence halls, and received its first full accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. These significant accomplishments created the foundation that allowed Christendom to launch its subsequent growth.

But Damian Fedoryka was called to do more. When Communism fell in Ukraine, he returned to his native land to help open the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv in 1992 – the first Catholic university to open on the territory of the former Soviet Union and the first university ever opened by an Eastern Catholic Church. He also taught philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Gaming Campus in Austria) and at Ave Maria College in Michigan. Soon after the passing of his beloved wife, he moved back to Front Royal, where several of his children had settled. He was the oldest member of Saints Joachim and Anna Ukrainian Catholic Parish on Linden Street in Front Royal.

All who met him knew him as a kind and patient man and a sage to countless people right up to the end. He leaves behind a close-knit family spread across the country: ten children and their spouses, thirty-five grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and thousands of former students. His sons Alexander and Danylo are the founders of the Celtic/folk/rock band Scythian, which organizes the Appaloosa Festival to be held at Skyline Ranch Resort on Labor Day weekend.

Connie Marshner 
Front Royal