August 14 St. Maximilian Kolbe

 

St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe (1894-1941)

August 14

            Raymund Kolbe was born in Poland. He and his brother Francis went to the Conventual Franciscan seminary in the city of Lwow. Raymond entered the order of little friars and took the name Maximilian. He was then sent to Rome where he studied philosophy and theology. While there, Maximilian established an organization dedicated to recognizing Mary as the Queen and Mother of human society called the "Army of the Immaculate One."  Maximilian was then ordained a priest in 1918.

            He was not in the best of health, but in 1927 near Warsaw, he established the "City of the Immaculate." (In Polish: Niepokalanów.) This grew to be a large Franciscan community of 738 members engaged in printing religious publications.  Their magazine called Knight of Mary Immaculate had a circulation of almost one million. The fantastic growth of this apostolate occurred during the worst years of the worldwide depression of the 1930’s. During most of that decade, Maximilian was establishing another City of the Immaculate near Nagasaki, Japan.

            From the writings of Father Maximilian: “Dear brother, see the greatness of human dignity conferred by God’s mercy. By obedience we surmount, so to speak, the limits imposed upon us by our weakness; we are made conformable to God’s will which in God’s infinite wisdom and prudence guides us to act correctly. As a matter of fact, by clinging to God’s will which no creature can resist, we surpass everything in power. This is the way of wisdom and prudence; this is the only way we can render the greatest glory to God.  If there were another and more suitable way, Christ surely would have shown it to us by his own words and example.”

            Before World War II began, he returned to Poland. The German Nazis who were occupying Poland soon restricted his activities and then halted publication of the Knight completely. He was arrested in February 1941 and sent to Auschwitz in May. Though very sick himself, he encouraged his fellow prisoners not to let the Nazis lead them to despair of God.

            One Franciscan source recounts that another prisoner, Dr. Joseph Stemler, wrote in his memoirs: “Like many others, I crawled at night in the infirmary on the bare floor to the bed of Father Maximilian. The greeting was moving. We exchanged some impressions of the frightful crematorium. He encouraged me, and I confessed. Discouragement and doubt threatened to overwhelm me; but I still wanted to love. He helped me to strengthen my belief in the final victory of good. ‘Hatred is not creative,’ he whispered to me. ‘Our sorrow is necessary that those who live after us may be happy.’ His reflections on the mercy of God went straight to my heart. His words to forgive the persecutors and to overcome evil with good kept me from collapsing into despair.”

            On July 30, 1941, a prisoner escaped from Auschwitz, and the Nazis retaliated by randomly choosing ten men to be executed by starvation. Father Maximilian offered to take the place of one of those ten, a Sergeant Francis Gajowniczek, who was a father and family man.  Maximilian led the men in prayer in their starvation bunker. During the third week of the ordeal, Maximilian and the other remaining survivors were killed with injections of carbolic acid.

Maximilian was beatified in 1971 and canonized in 1982. He is venerated as the patron saint of amateur radio operators, drug addicts, political prisoners, and journalists. His cell at Auschwitz is a place of pilgrimage. Saint Edith Stein, who was also killed at Auschwitz in 1942, is commemorated a few days prior on August 9^th. As a Discalced Carmelite nun, she took the religious name of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Together, these two Catholic saints stand as witnesses against the atrocities and horror of Nazism.