St Maximilian Kolbe
on truth and faith and holiness
Translated from
August 14, 2018
“No one in the world can change the truth” was the title of the last editorial written by St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz on August 14, 1941, after he offered to die in place of another Polish prisoner who was the father of a large family.
“Take me,” Fr. Kolbe said. “I am a Catholic priest and I am old.” (He was only 47.)
The calendar for the first half of August honors an extraordinary series of saints - Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori, Jean Marie Vianney, Domingo de Guzmán (St Dominic), Teresa Benedetta della Croce (Edith Stein), Clare of Assisi), and today, Maximilian Kolbe, whom John Paul II called ‘a martyr of love’ and ‘patron of our difficult century’ when he canonized him in 1982.
In Kolbe’s life, many aspects ruled decisively but his two polar stars were the truth and Mary. In following those stars, he became an apostle, missionary, entrepreneur, and media man who utilized the printed word and radio to spread the Gospel.
He wrote:
“We should inundate the world with a flood of Christian and Marian writings in every language, in every place, in order to drown in truth every manifestation of error which has found in the press its most powerful ally. We must fill the world of the written word with words of life to give back to the world the joy of living”.
In 1917, at age 23, in the year of the October Revolution in Russia, he founded the Milita of the Immaculate, a Catholic association which came to number 700,000 members and whose monthly journal,
Il Cavaliere dell’Immacolata (The Knight of the Immaculate), reached a print run of one million.
Brilliant in mathematics and passionate about physics and astronomy (he was also an excellent chess player), even at school, he was thinking in terms of interplanetary vehicles. His interests were many and wide-ranging but
above all else was his faith. And the truth.
During his years of study in Rome, he asked a friend about Freemasonry:
“Is it possible that the enemies of God could be doing everything in their power whereas we remain inactive and at most, we pray but without acting?”
When he realized there were Catholics who indulged their pleasures in immoral films, he said, instead of recriminating, that it would be best if they became businessmen who invented in films with ‘good’ content.
Yet he was combative and determined about his causes and found a way to argue and to teach even when hospitalized. It happened in Zakopane while he was a lecturer in the history of the Church in Cracow.
When he went to Japan as a missionary, his bishop allotted him a sum of money to get a home, but he said it would be put to better use in publishing Catholic magazines.
For his publishing enterprise, he only wished state-of-the-art technology. At Niepokalanow, his first convent, where he first set up a publishing house, he worked tirelessly. Besides the monthly
Cavaliere, he also produced a calendar of the Knights of the Immaculate (380,000 in its first run). Then there was the
Piccolo Giornale (Small Newspaper) which he published in seven editions for every geographical region in Poland.
Seven hundred brother priests worked with him. Without every giving up in the face of difficulties. They even got to invent a new electric machine to stamp addresses – it would win first prize at industrial fairs in Poznam and Paris.
Kolbe enjoined his co-workers that every number of the magazine must be prepared in prayer and on their knees. When he became ill with tuberculosis, someone put a ‘Do not disturb’ sign of his door but he had it taken off. “Everyone can come to me at any hour of the day or night, always,” he said. “I belong to them”.
In Nagasaki, Japan, where he set up a printing press and opened a new magazine with a monthly run of 18,000, he wrote one of his brother priests:
“Our task here is very simple: work hard the whole day, kill ourselves with work, be considered fools by some, and ultimately, to die for the Immaculate. Isn’t this a beautiful ideal of life?”
He travelled, he studied (including the Russian language), and he made plans. And it took a physical toll on him. At one point, he was given only three months to live. But he lived on, and his doctors could not understand how it was possible.
Then everything came to a head in 1939. Officers of the Werhmacht and the Gestapo showed up at the gates of his convent and he was taken into custody. Then began his Via Crucis in a series of jails: Lamsdorf, Amititz, Ostrzeszow, Pawiak, and finally, Auschwitz, where he arrived in 1941 on board an armored vehicle. During the trip, he sang hymns.
When the Nazis decided to choose a few prisoners to condemn to death as a reprisal, one of the latter was Francis Gajowniczek, who begged the Nazis to spare his life for the sake of his family. Then and there, Fr. Kolbe offered to take his place. And on August 14, 1941, he was injected with carbolic acid. The next day, Feast of the Assumption, his corpse was burned.
At one time, Kolbe had said:
“I would like to be like dust – to travel with the wind and reach every part of the world to preach the Gospel”.
It is said that during a meeting with some novices, Kolbe, speaking of holiness, sought to show how the objective should not be difficult, by writing a capital W and small w, and then simulating an algebraic equation with the two symbols, he said:
“When our will is conformed to the will of God, then we shall be saints”.
He wrote:
“No one can can change the truth. We know that very well. But in real life, we sometimes behave as though in certain vases, yes and no can both be the truth. Not even God cancels the truth nor can he change it because He himself is truth in essence. How great is the power of truth – it is really infinite and divine!”
It is really amazing how almost every report, story or anecdote that has to do with genuine goodness ends up sounding like a reproach to the wrongdoings of Bergoglio. I am a sinner, too, but my mistakes, faults and sins do not impact anybody else but me, most of all, and to a lesser degree, those I harm wittingly but more often unwittingly, by these offenses. I do wittingly criticize Bergoglio but what I write and think of him can hardly harm him, and I do not cease praying for him (she says in self-defense!)