Maximilian Kolbe

stjohnstmarkchurchburyWednesday, August 14, 2019

Preacher: Keith Trivasse | Series: Max Kolbe | Today is the feast of Maximilian Kolbe, a friar who died as a martyr in Auschwitz. He was born in 1894 in a small village near Lodz in Poland. His parents were both pious catholics and members of the Third Order of Franciscans. Kolbe was deeply influenced by his parents and in 1907 began his training for ordination. In 1910 he joined the Franciscan novitiate. He studied in Rome but fell ill with tuberculosis. He returned to Poland and became a lecturer in church history. After suffering a severe illness he resolved to begin a magazine for Christian readers and this soon gained a huge circulation.  Soon his community was producing daily and weekly journals.

After the Nazi invasion of Poland, Maximilian was arrested as an ‘intellectual’ and taken to Auschwitz in May 1941. There he continued his priestly ministry, secretly celebrating Mass. When, after an escape, a prisoner was chosen to forfeit his life as an example, Maximilian stepped forward to take his place and be put to death. Two weeks later he was injected with phenol and died on this day in 1941.

This looks a straightforward case of a holy priest going to a holy death, of giving up his life for the sake of others. However there is a problem. The problem lies in the nature of the magazine he founded for Christian readers. It was not merely catholic, which was to be expected. The magazine was nationalist in tone and content. And Polish nationalism of that period was implicitly or explicitly anti-Semitic. Maximilian’s magazine was at very least implicitly anti-Semitic and helped fuel the rising tide of anti-Semitic nationalism that was driving Polish politics. Can someone who is at least implicitly, and possibly explicitly anti-Semitic become a saint in a time when anti-Semitism would lead to six million Jews being killed?

I think that what saves Maximilian Kolbe and makes him into a true martyr is exactly his willingness to risk all for his Christian brothers and sisters and risk all, even his own life, for the sake of a Jewish inmate. God uses strange people for strange times. And Kolbe is exactly the sort of saint who comes to the fore under the tension of difficult times.

God’s forgiveness is over all. It is that forgiveness which forgave Maximilian Kolbe his sins of Polish nationalism and anti-Semitism and made him into a saint. It is that same forgiveness which touches us and makes us part of the communion of saints. God’s grace forgives all things and touches all things and raises us up from death to new life. And for that we must and should give thanks.