Today’s grace: St. Maximilian Kolbe

At this year’s Easter Vigil, I will celebrate the tenth anniversary of my homecoming to the Body of Christ, the Church. During Lent, I’ll be posting a daily reflection on one of the practices, doctrines, personalities, and moments that have been particularly precious to me during my ten years as a Catholic.

On the Easter Vigil 1997, I chose two Confirmation names, Justin and Maximilian, for Ss. Justin Martyr and Maximilian Kolbe. St. Maximilian Kolbe was a Pole (born Raymond Kolbe) and member of the Conventual Franciscan Order. His deep devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, especially in her role as the Immaculata (or the one graced by the Immaculate Conception), led him to build a Marian renewal movement that stretched from his native Poland to Japan, where he built a “City of the Immaculate” evangelization center in 1930. St. Maximilian also pioneered the use of modern media for the purposes of evangelization. His friars published a daily newspaper with a circulation of a quarter-million and a monthly magazine with a circulation over over one million. Kolbe also began a shortwave radio ministry and planned to build a movie studio to produce Catholic films.

Unfortunately, all of this fervently fecund evangelistic work was brought to a screeching halt in September 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland and quickly occupied the entire country. Fr. Maximilian withdrew into his City of the Immaculate center near Warsaw and transformed the facility into a refugee shelter that housed up to 3,000 people, including 2,000 Jews. In May 1941 the City of the Immaculate was raided and shut down. Fr. Maximilian and four other friars were sent to the death camp at Auschwitz. Fr. Maximilian was singled out for especially harsh treatment precisely because he was a priest. In spite of the extra labor, beatings, and daily insults directed at him by the camp guards, Fr. Maximilian persisted in his vocation as a priest, routinely giving away his meager food rations and attending to the spiritual needs of his fellow prisoners. At night, Fr. Maximilian would move through the barracks, stopping at each bunk to ask, “Can I do anything for you? I am a Catholic priest.”

In late July 1941 a man from Fr. Kolbe’s barracks escaped (though he was later found dead.) In a rage, the camp commandant ordered that ten men from the barrack should be selected at random and executed. One of those chosen was Franciszek Gajowniczek, a Polish Jewish farmer and soldier who Maximilian knew to be a married man with children. Kolbe stepped out of the formation and approached the commandant. Pointing at Gajowniczek, he said “I am a Catholic priest, but this man is a husband and father. I would like to take his place.” The commandant agreed and ordered Gajowniczek back into the ranks of prisoners. Fr. Maximilian and nine others were placed in a tiny starvation bunker where they were exposed to the elements. One by one the men died of exposure, madness and malnutrition, and one by one Fr. Kolbe ministered to them, leading them in prayers and meditations on the Passion of Christ. After two weeks only four of the men remained alive, including Fr. Kolbe. Tired of waiting for them to die, on August 14, 1941, a Nazi thug injected each man with cabolic acid. Fr. Kolbe was the last to die and with a prayer on his lips he raised his arm for the executioner’s needle.

Many years later, in the canonization ceremony for Fr. Maximilian on October 12, 1982, Pope John Paul II called him a “prophet of the civilization of love,” and asked: “Does not this death - faced spontaneously, for love of man - constitute a particular fulfillment of the words of Christ? Does not this death make Maximilian particularly like unto Christ - the Model of all Martyrs - who gives his own life on the Cross for his brethren? Does not this death possess a particular and penetrating eloquence for our age? Does not this death constitute a particularly authentic witness of the Church in the modern world?”

In one of the most moving codas to the story of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the beneficiary of his loving substitution, Franciszek Gajowniczek, was present in St. Peter’s Square for the canonization. He had survived Auschwitz and returned home to find his wife alive but his two sons dead. Every year thereafter, Gajowniczek had returned to Auschwitz on August 14, the anniversary of St. Maximilian’s death. Though Jewish, he spent much of the rest of his life making public the martyrdom of the man who had literally saved him from the executioner’s needle. Franciszek Gajowniczek died in 1995 at the of 94. The man who rescued him in July 1941 now beholds the beatific vision in the company of his beloved Immaculata and his fellow saints and martyrs. Praise be to God.

(Mark Gordon)

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 11:30 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.