It’s time to update this thread with another great saint, this time a contemporary for many of us, St. Maximilian Kolbe, OFM, Conv. Brother Maximilian Kolbe was a Franciscan Friar and a priest. He gave his life in a concentration camp to save the life of a young Jewish man who was about to be executed. Being as the young man had a wife and family, Max stepped up to the plate and offered to take his place.
As a young man Max prayed to the Blessed Mother and asked her what was to become of him. While in deep prayer he saw an image of Our Lady. She was holding two crowns, a white one and a red one. She asked him which one he preferred. When he asked the vision what they meant, Our Lady said that one was for purity and the other for martyrdom. Then she repeated her question, “Which do you want?” Max responded, “Both of them.”
Here was a man who was not afraid to ask God for “too much.” He knew that God could give him both the crown of purity and the crown of martyrdom. How this was to happen, he had no idea, but that didn’t matter. The important thing is that he believed that nothing was impossible for God. Like his Holy Father Francis, he believed that God in his mercy could give us anything that we ask for our salvation and the salvation of others. God can not only do it, be he desires to do so.
Another beautiful and exciting quality about Max is his fidelity to his Holy Father Francis. He does not pray to Our Lady to ask her to give him what he believes he needs. Instead his prayer is truly framed in holy poverty as St. Francis had taught the Brothers centuries before. Max presented himself before the Blessed Mother completely detached. He was open to the will of God in his life. He could not have approached a better person. Mary too had said, “Be it done to me according to they word.” Just like Mary was poor, detached from her own will and her own desires, so was Max. His only desire was to know God’s will in his life. This is why he asks our Lady this question. We too are called to approach the Lord and his Blessed Mother with the same spirit of detachment in our time. It is not up to us to ask God to do this or that for us or to fix the Church this way or that way, because we find it more beautiful or more acceptable to our idea of truth. We are not to ask God to lead us down this path or that path, because we believe it will make us happier or holier.
Our happiness and our holiness are to be found in the will of God for our lives. So, Max is not asking our Lady to foreshadow the future for him. She’s not a fortune teller. He’s really asking her to show him the way. “What is to become of me?” is his way of asking, where is God leading me. Max does not want to know this just out of mere curiosity. He wants to know because he wants to fulfil God’s plan in his life. Are you wiling to ask such an open-ended question of God?
Interestingly enough, Max’s time in history was not so different from our own. There were many errors and the Church had many enemies. Max set out to combat these errors. But unlike the many of us here on these threads, Max took the responsible approach. He did not settle for reading a few documents and quoting citations out of context. At 16 he became a serious student of theology, by the time he was 25 he has two PhDs, one in Theology and one in Philosophy. He founded Our Lady’s Militia.
The term militia was taken from the expression “the Church Militant.” How different was Max’s understanding of the Church militant to the way that many people throw that term around today. He understood it in its proper context, the context given by Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi. The Church militant consisted of those souls who are still struggling for their salvation, no people seeking conflicts with others or doing battle with others.
In fact, he remembered what Francis had told Anthony of Padua when Anthony requested permission to teach the friars theology. Francis responded, “It is permissible to teach the Brothers theology on one condition, that it does not extinguish the spirit of prayer, obedience to me and my successors, charity toward neighbour and breed pride.” With this exhortation in mind, Max sets out to found a parallel community of Franciscans whom he names our Ladies Militia and Later would be renamed the Franciscans of the Immaculate, a branch of the Third Order Regular Franciscans. They were also to have secular members. Whether the individual lived in a friary or with his or her family, the mission was the same.
Error would be combated by living the virtuous life, prayer, work and suffering.
Max would later give the greatest example of this in a concentration camp where he prayed, performed forced manual labour and give his life in place of a Jewish man who had been selected by the Nazis to be punished for an escaped prisoner.
You may ask why he took the Jewish man’s place. Max may have been set free. He was not Jewish. Max also believed in Ecumenism. Like Francis before him and Bishop Woytyla who was then the bishop in Max’s home diocese, Max was convinced that the Jews were our older brothers and sisters in the faith. He loved them. It was because he loved them that he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp in the first place. The arresting Nazi officers had shouted and spat on his face, “if you love the dirty Jews so much, then go and be one with them.” To which Maximilian responded, “We are already one. For even as it is unknown to them at this time, one of their own gave his life so that all of us can have eternal life.”
I will have the honour of a private meeting with his niece and the grandson of the Jewish inmate that Max saved, this summer when she visits our parish which will be renamed in honour of her uncle. I can’t wait to meet her.
americancatholic.org/Features/SaintOfDay/default.asp?id=1107
JR
No kidding! I remember when you mentioned his sudden illness then. That is exciting news! :yup:
