(Because St. Maximilian evangelized Jews so effectively, liberal Jews occasionally call him an anti-Semite. He was, of course, exactly the opposite). "The most deadly poison of our times is indifference. And this happens, although the praise of God should know no limits. Let us strive, therefore, to praise Him to the greatest extent of our powers."
St. Maximilian Kolbe
Early Years
Raymond Kolbe was born in Poland on January 8, 1894. In 1910, he entered the Conventual Franciscan Order. In 1912 Kolbe went to Rome, where he studied theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University. In 1917 he founded the sodality (devotional association) of the Militia of Mary Immaculate, and was ordained a priest in 1918, taking the name Maximilian.
St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Jews
When Pope John Paul II canonized St. Maximilian Kolbe in 1982, several Jews charged that he had been an anti-Semite. The charges were extreme: “...pursued a relentless anti-Semitic campaign...” and “...rabid racist anti-Semitism...” were typical.
The Record of History
Poles and Jews had lived together for a thousand years. People often ask why Hitler put Auschwitz, his largest death camp, in Poland rather than Germany. It was because Poland harbored the single largest Jewish community in the world. When other European countries persecuted or expelled Jews from their lands, Poland served as a haven for Jews and was the foremost center of Jewish learning and culture. It was the Poles who brought the genocide of the Jews to the attention of the incredulous West. In fact, in Poland there was an underground organization, the Zegota, established expressly to assist Jews.
The City of Mary Immaculate
During the 1920’s Father Kolbe built a friary just west of Warsaw, the City of Mary Immaculate (Niepokalanów), which eventually housed 762 Franciscans. It became Poland’s chief Catholic publishing complex, printing eleven periodicals including a daily newspaper, The Little Daily, with a circulation of 230,000 and a monthly journal, The Knight of Mary Immaculate (Rycerz Niepokalanej), with a circulation of over one million. To better “win the world for the Immaculata,” the friars utilized the most modern printing and administrative techniques. This enabled them to publish countless catechetical and devotional tracts. Father Kolbe served both as superior of the City of Mary Immaculate and director of the publishing complex. Father Kolbe soon added a radio station and planned to build a movie studio.
After travel to Asia, where he founded similar friaries in Nagasaki and India, and envisioned similar missionary centers worldwide, Father Kolbe was recalled in 1936 to supervise the original friary near Warsaw. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he knew that his monastery would be seized, and sent most of the friars home. The Gestapo ransacked the City of Mary Immaculate and arrested Father Kolbe with about 40 other friars. They were sent to a holding camp in Germany, then to one in Poland.
Father Kolbe’s Writings
The dynamic Father Kolbe wrote 10,006 extant letters and 396 other writings (newspaper and magazine writings, spiritual conferences, etc.). Of these, 31 refer to Jews or Judaism. Their content is overwhelmingly spiritual and apostolic, with few comments of any kind on contemporary political, social, economic, or other secular concerns.
In his monthly journal, and his daily paper, Kolbe used the printed word to inform the public about national political and cultural problems. The Little Daily championed Catholic moral and social views. For example, when the paper presented the idea that Catholic children should be taught in Catholic schools by Catholic teachers, it was the same as Orthodox Jewish rabbis saying, as they do today, that Jewish children should be taught in Jewish schools by Jewish teachers.
Among Father Kolbe’s writings cited was his appeal that readers pray for the “straying children of Israel,” to “lead them to the knowledge of the truth and the achievement of true peace and happiness, since Jesus died for everyone, and therefore for every Jew also …” The Catholic Church has taught for two thousand years that Christ’s sacrifice redeemed all mankind. Jews have said for two thousand years that they do not accept Jesus as God’s Messiah. It follows that from a Catholic perspective, which Father Kolbe was certainly entitled to proclaim, that the Jews hold to an incomplete revelation and that they would benefit spiritually from embracing Christ.
Father Kolbe believed that the so-called Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a master plan for Jewish world domination later shown to be an virulently anti-Semitic Russian forgery, was an actual plan drawn up by Zionists. During the 1920s, when Father Kolbe read the Protocols, many Polish Jews as well as Catholics assumed that they were a Zionist plan. Father Kolbe mentioned the Protocols in two articles. Reflecting the Protocol’s rhetoric, Father Kolbe referred to the people who had apparently published it as “a cruel, crafty, little known Jewish clique,” a “small handful of Jews [who had let themselves] be seduced by Satan.” Jews use comparable language in condemning the Protocols.
A Shelter for Jews
On December 8, 1939, the Gestapo released Father Kolbe. He returned to the City of Mary Immaculate, where he and the other friars began to organize a shelter for three thousand Polish refugees, including two thousand Jews. The friars shared everything they had with the refugees. They housed, fed and clothed them, and brought all their machinery into use in their service.
Father Kolbe’s sheltering of these two thousand Jews aroused the Nazis to full fury. To incriminate him, the Gestapo permitted one final printing of the “Knight of Mary Immaculate” in December of 1940. It was in this issue that Father Maximilian wrote: “The real conflict is inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of concentration camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are victories on the battle-field if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”
On February 17, 1941, Father Maximilian was again arrested, this time on charges of aiding Jews and the Polish underground. Gestapo officers who were shown around the whole monastery were astonished at the small amount of food prepared for the brothers. Father Maximilian was sent to the infamous Pawiak prison in German Occupied Warsaw, and was singled out for special ill-treatment.
On May 28, 1941 the Nazis closed the the City of Mary Immaculate and took Father Kolbe, with four of his companions, to Auschwitz, where he died.
Heroic Sacrifice
At Auschwitz, after a prisoner escaped, the Nazis chose ten men to be killed. When Franciszek Gajowniczek, protested that he had a wife and children, Father Kolbe stepped forward and offered to replace Gajowniczek among those killed. Father Kolbe was thrown into a starvation bunker, where he taught the Catholic faith to the others in the bunker and prayed with them as they died one by one. After two weeks, Father Kolbe remained alive. Finally, on August 14, 1941 the Nazis injected phenol into his veins, killing him at last. Franciszek Gajowniczek survived and told the story of Father Kolbe’s heroic sacrifice to everyone he could until his death in 1997.
Church Honors
Father Maximilian was a fervent advocate of devotion to the Virgin Mary and a ground-breaking theologian. His insights into the Immaculate Conception anticipated the Marian theology of the Second Vatican Council and further developed the Church’s understanding of Mary as “Mediatrix” of all the graces of the Trinity, and as “Advocate” for God’s people.
On Oct. 17, 1971, Father Kolbe was beatified by Pope Paul VI, the first Nazi victim to be proclaimed blessed by the Roman Catholic church. On October 10, 1982, Pope John Paul II canonized him, proclaiming also that he was to be venerated as a martyr. St. Maximilian Kolbe is considered a patron of journalists, families, prisoners, the pro-life movement and the chemically addicted.
Pray to St. Maximilian especially for the following:
1. The Pro-Life movement
2. Addiction
3. Eating disorders
4. Families
5. Prisoners
6. The victims of discrimination, persecution or genocide
7. The conversion of souls
8. Release of a soul in purgatory
9. Success in new ministry.
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