Today is the Feast of Saint Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941), the Polish Franciscan priest who was executed in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in southern Poland after he had offered himself as a ransom for the life of a fellow prisoner who was a father of a family.
“Providentially, I visited Auschwitz upon this day back in 2008,” recalls David Kerr, Director of Communications for the Diocese of Lansing, August 14.
“Rather impiously, however, I was initially unaware that my visit coincided with the Feast of Saint Maximilian. That soon changed upon happening upon the cell where he spent his final days. This was the ‘starvation bunker’ where Father Maximillian had been deprived of food and water for two weeks before being murdered by lethal injection by his SS guards.”
“Despite its grim history, upon that feast day in 2008, Saint Maximillian’s cell was a place of light and peace and prayer, festooned with flickering candles, and busied by a steady stream of pilgrims seeking his heavenly intercession and honoring his heroic witness to Jesus Christ sustained, as he was, by the maternal protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”
Poland’s National Remembrance Institute estimates that half of all Polish priests, monks and nuns suffered repression during the six years of the Second World War, with more than 2,800 killed at Nazi and Soviet hands.
Meanwhile, of the nearly 2,720 clergy of all denominations incarcerated at the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau in southern Germany, 2,579 were Catholic priests of whom 1,034 died during the war. The vast majority of these priests were Polish.
“The lesson of that day in Auschwitz back in 2008 – and the message of the hundreds of canonized and beatified martyrs of Nazi persecution – is that God’s grace is always sufficient even amid the darkest of circumstances and, most startlingly, that great suffering can be greatly redemptive,” says David.
“As Saint Paul observes ‘where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’.” (Romans 5:20-21). Let us pray:
O God, who filled the Priest and Martyr Saint Maximilian Kolbe with a burning love for the Immaculate Virgin Mary and with zeal for souls and love of neighbor, graciously grant, through his intercession, that striving for your glory by eagerly serving others, we may be conformed, even until death, to your Son. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.