Auschwitz.
A Nazi concentration camp in Poland. It only functioned for five
years during World War II, yet, more than a half century later, its very
name conjures up images that horrify the eye, tear at the heart, and bewilder
the mind about the potential for brutality within the human condition.
With its victims numbering more than one million men, women and children,
how many cruelties must have been inflicted there every minute of every
day of every year of its awful existence.
It is a testament to the inherent goodness of the same human condition
that uncountable acts of mercy, kindness, and self-sacrifice also took
place within those same electrified fences. While most of those selfless
deeds were lost to history with the lives of the ones who performed them,
one that is remembered is celebrated today, the feast day of St. Maximilian
Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan monk, the acknowledged “saint of Auschwitz.” Kolbe
had already made his mark in the Church, long before his imprisonment.
A passionate devotee of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, he had employed his
extraordinary organizational skills to promote that Marian devotion through
establishment of new monastic communities, a lay movement, and numerous
widely read journals. What has etched his name in religious history,
however, took place after he had been interred at Auschwitz, when a fellow
prisoner from his housing block was discovered missing. In retaliation,
as was the practice, ten men were arbitrarily selected for starvation.
When one of them, a young sergeant in the Polish army, bemoaned never seeing
his wife or children again, Kolbe stepped forward to take his place.
His final tortuous days were spent in prayer, support, and encouragement
of his companions as they slid toward death. On August 14, 1941,
prison guards, needing the space for another batch of the condemned, injected
him with a lethal dose of carbolic acid and sent his corpse off to a camp
crematorium.
Today’s readings are a befitting celebration of this holy and heroic
man. Ezekiel reminds us of both the justice and the mercy of God,
Who knows all that happens, Who punishes our “abominations” while still
recognizing the good that we do. It is in the Gospel passage, however,
that my reflection on Maximilian Kolbe lingers and that my admiration for
him grows. Through Matthew, Jesus reminds us that “where two or three
are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” That Kolbe
found Christ amid the dirt, the disease, the desperation, and the death
of Auschwitz is not only inspiring, but also astonishing. Likewise
called to find God in all things, surely then I can find that Loving Presence
in my own relatively trivial trials—in children who defy, in colleagues
who disagree, in students who disappoint, in drivers who dawdle, even—indeed,
especially—in my own struggles to live out Christ’s message. Today,
that’s St. Maximilian Kolbe’s message, too.
|