The Feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe

The reality of death through martyrdom is always a torment; but, the secret of that death is the fact that God is greater than the torment. So then, we have before us a martyr—Maximilian Kolbe—the minister of his own death—stronger still in his love, to which he was faithful, in which he grew throughout his life, in which he matured in the camp at Auschwitz…That maturing of love which filled the whole life of Fr. Maximilian and reached its definitive fulfillment on Polish soil in the act at Auschwitz, that maturing was linked in a special way to the Immaculate Handmaid of the Lord….

Maximilian Kolbe, like few others, was filled with the mystery of the divine election of Mary. His heart and his thoughts were concentrated in a particular way upon that ‘new beginning,’ which—through the work of the Redeemer—was signified by the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of his earthly incarnation…Maximilian Kolbe penetrated this mystery in a particularly profound way and complete way: not in the abstract, but in the life-filled context of the Triune God, Son and Holy Spirit, and in the life-filled context of the divine salvific plan for the world….Once there arose, in the Middle Ages, the legend of St. Stanislaus. Our time, our age will not create a legend of St. Maximilian. The eloquence of the facts themselves, the testimony of his life and martyrdom, is strong enough.

-Blessed John Paul II, who canonized St. Maximilian Kolbe on October 10, 1982 (Matthew and Margaret Bunson, John Paul II’s Book of Saints, 118).

St. Maximilian Kolbe, who refused to let the Nazis take your soul and instead gave up your life on Earth out of love for another, pray for us!