What Do You Do?
Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15.13)
Picture yourself in the death camp at Auschwitz. You’re standing in formation with all your fellow prisoners. The Nazis who run the camp offer a harsh disincentive to escape: for every inmate who breaks out of the camp the guards pick out ten other prisoners at random and starve them to death.
As it happens, there has been such an escape, and the prisoners have been called together for the purpose of choosing the ten. The guards finish selecting their victims, and before it even begins to sink in that you are not among those chosen for the starvation bunker you see one of those who were chosen break down, begging to be released because he’s a husband and father. What do you do . . . .?
If you’re Fr. Maximilian Kolbe, you don’t need to choose. Without hesitation you step forward and say, “Take me instead.”
Two Crowns
Today we celebrate the feast of one of great Saints of the last century, St. Maximilian Kolbe, priest and martyr. He died by lethal injection on this date in 1941, after suffering for two weeks in the starvation bunker in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. When he was a young man he had a dream in which the Blessed Mother offered him two crowns. One was the white crown of purity, the other the red crown of martyrdom. He chose both. We remember him for several things. One, for his determination to spread the Gospel through the most up-to-date means available. Also, for his devotion to Our Lady, his personal sanctity, and his heroic, self-sacrificing death.
From his earliest days, St. Maximilian was eager to spread the faith. He became a Conventual Franciscan. He didn’t even wait for ordination before he founded The Militia Immaculata. The MI is a movement open to all Catholics that aims, through consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary, for the spiritual renewal of individuals and society. Evangelization is a large part of the Militia’s mission. To that end St. Maximilian founded a large community for that purpose in his native Poland and published a magazine he called The Knight of the Immaculata. He later established a similar community in Nagasaki, Japan. He became fluent in Japanese with astounding rapidity so that he could publish in that country as well.
St. Maximilian also evangelized through the example, not only of his sanctity, but also of his personal warmth and prodigious generosity. Those who knew him at Auschwitz (an amazing number of whom somehow survived the experience) always spoke of his constant concern for his fellow prisoners, in spite of the sometimes worse abuse that he himself was suffering. In the end, he gave the ultimate gift: his own life. When his jailers chose ten men at random to be starved to death in retaliation for an escape, St. Maximilian, who had not been chosen, volunteered to take the place of one of the ten. The other man had a wife and children while the celibate Catholic priest had none.
The modern means of communication available in St. Maximilian Kolbe’s day was a printing press. If he were with use today, he would not only be publishing in print, but also would be a presence online, publishing, blogging, and taking full advantage of social media. Not surprisingly, he is Patron Saint of journalists, as well as drug addicts, families, political prisoners, and the pro-life movement (and also one of the patrons of this blog). Even more than his eloquence, however, or his ability to communicate the beauty of the Catholic Faith, St. Maximilian witnessed with his own life. He lived up to both the Crowns offered by the Blessed Mother, and like Our Lord, showed us that “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
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