Saint Maximilian Kolbe - Great Saint of Auschwitz

By TOM DENNEHY

We celebrate the feast day of Saint Maximilian Kolbe on August 14th. He is known by many titles but is best known as The Saint of Auschwitz. He was the priest who gave his life for a fellow prisoner in the concentration camp in Auschwitz. He was willing to die so that a fellow prisoner with a family could be set free.

But before this he was just Raymond, Raymond Kolbe, who in 1894 was born into a poor Polish family. And from the beginning, one wouldn’t have guessed he would eventually become a great saint. In fact, one day, his mother was so frustrated with his behaviour that she yelled at him in exasperation, “What will be become of you?” This shocked the boy to the core. Filled with grief, he immediately turned to the mother of God, asking her, “What will become of me?”

Then he went to the church and asked her the same question. The future saint recounted what happened next. “Then the Virgin Mother appeared to me holding in her hands two crowns, one white and one red. She looked at me with love and asked me if I would like to have them. The white meant that I would remain pure and the red that I would be a martyr. I answered yes, I wanted them both. Then she looked at me tenderly and disappeared.”

The white crown of purity came first when he became Brother Maximilian and professed religious vows. Perhaps because of his natural intensity and passion, Kolbe felt a particular strong desire to give himself to a specific mission or goal. In 1917 he, along with six of his fellow seminarians, began the “Militia Immaculata” (Army of the Immaculate One). Its goal was to bring the whole world to God through Christ under the generalship of Mary Immaculate and he sacrificed everything for its accomplishment.

Saint Maximilian’s teaching on devotion to Mary is legendary and recommends we give all our prayer offerings to her, even our entire lives over in consecration to her. She is the Mediatrix of all graces. It is God’s will that she distributes his graces.

Father Maximilian encouraged adoration of the Blessed Sacrament as “the most important activity.” He had a dream that in the chapel of Niepokalanow in Poland the Lord Jesus would be exposed in a monstrance day and night. In 1938, he stated, “my aim is to institute perpetual adoration. When we come to the chapel, we gain for ourselves and for others many graces, particularly if the whole day is given to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. By this adoration, a tremendous amount of good is done.” In speaking about perpetual adoration, he said, “there flows an uninterrupted stream of prayer. Prayer is the greatest power in the universe, capable of transforming each of us, capable of changing the face of the earth.”

In 1941, after decades of incredibly fruitful apostolic labours in Poland and Japan, Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo for providing shelter for refugees including 2000 Jews and publishing anti- Nazi German publications and sent to Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Before his arrest, his brother Franciscans had pleaded with him to go into hiding. He said he was grateful for their loving hearts but couldn’t follow their advice. Later he explained why, “I have a mission - the Immaculate has a mission for me to fulfil”.

That mission was accomplished on the eve of the feast of Mary's Assumption into Heaven, when, after having volunteered to take the place of a prisoner condemned to starvation, the impatient Nazis finished off Kolbe with a lethal injection. Thus St. Maximilian died a martyr of charity and received his second crown, his red crown, from his Blessed Mother. It is amazing what God can do despite great evil and great atrocities where more than one million people were put to death that we have one of the greatest saints of the 20th century.

Maximilian Kolbe was canonized a saint on 10 Oct 1982 by Saint John Paul 11. He is patron saint of amateur radio operators, drug addicts, political prisoners, families, journalists, prisoners, and the pro-life movement. Saint Maximilian Kolbe, pray and intercede for us.