On August 14, 1941, the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, the gentle deeply green and fertile plains near the Vistula and the Sola would witness another death - that of a man, number 16670 in the facility, who was, as he identified himself, "a Catholic priest". Neither half-German nor half-Polish - this priest belonged entirely to the Immaculata.
We now post what we hope will be the first of several contributions sent by our readers on the life and passion of Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe.
The Prince of Auschwitz
(M. Ortiz)
Amid the smoke-filled, foul air of Auschwitz, the light of Divine charity shone with incandescent splendor in the heart of Saint Maximilan Kolbe. He took the words of the Credo, that his father in heaven was “omnipotentem” with the absolute seriousness that only those who love understand.
From the moment he walked into the hell on earth that was the idolatry of blood, Auschwitz, to his last breath on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption, 1941, Fr. Maximilan cherished this light he bore within him, sealed by his baptism, and conformed forever to the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
Its supernatural origin—not just something he summoned within—remained his stay and his strength.
Kolbe knew that all things proceed from God, are sustained by him, and are therefore subject to his loving Providence. In the ravages of hunger, abuse, and humiliation, in the crucible of suffering, Kolbe breathed with the psalms the ancient faith that the evil-doer undoes himself, annihilates himself, even as worldly eyes see malice’s apparent triumph, the vanquishing of the Lord’s chosen one in blood, and tears that are dried only in the indifferent wind.
In this silence, where the sky does not darken before an open hell, his Faith was purified as gold is before the refiner’s fire.
An apparition of Our Lady secured his hope early in life. With his noble boy’s heart, he leapt at the offer of both life-long purity and final martyrdom. He instinctively knew, perhaps, that both are twined together around the one wick of Divine Fire, the impulse to give each moment back to the Father who has given us such a Redeemer, his very Son.
Contrary to our expectations, he was not a “man of iron” by disposition or temperament. He wept easily when young, and suffered the usual anxieties over the upheaval of his life and work—a vast media Apostolate, even by the our standards—during the Second World War. He would leave to the butchers the pride of hardening one’s heart to the delicate inspirations of Grace.
Embracing the priesthood, the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar became the center of his spiritual life, his very being. With a chivalrous love of Our Lady, he walked to the altar of God knowing he was—each day--walking to Calvary, and therefore towards the Easter that does not end.
Amid the smells and shadows of the starvation chamber, he lived spiritually the Holy Mass each day, hour, and moment of his final agony. “Without sacrifice, there is no love,” he wrote to a fellow priest. May his intercession further purge us of our idolatries and the sentimentalities that so mar our worship, our loves, our fatuous claims to modernity and maturity." (Letter of S. Maximilian)
St. Maximilan walked as a prince at Auschwitz because he knew that each labored breath he took, in union with the God-Man, the Christ, unstitched the tattered garments of sin over his own soul and the world’s. His Apostolate bore everything in him—his will, his gifted intellect, his manly zeal—to the Altar of God that restores to his heart the joys of his youth, and offers to the many who accept the Christ, a baptismal garment clean and pure as the first morning of creation.
All this, for the love of a Lady, whose bold nod brought forth the Incarnate Word, and knocked the thrones of hell into eternal confusion.
“Signum magnum aparuit in caelo: mulier amicta sole, et luna sub pedibus ejus, et in capite ejus corona stelarum duodecim.” (Introit for Feast of Assumption)
