Thought for the Week, September 7, 2025

 

In the book Gift and Mystery, written on the 50th anniversary of his priestly ordination, Pope St John Paul II wrote of the outbreak of the Second World War on September 1, 1939. Enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University to take courses in Polish language and letters, he was able to complete only the first year of his studies when the war broke out (Gift and Mystery, pages 6 and 7).

In his words, “The outbreak of the war radically changed the course of my life. True, the professors of the Jagiellonian University tried to start the new academic year in the usual way, but lectures lasted only until 6 November 1939. On that day, the German authorities assembled all the teachers in a meeting which ended with the deportation of those distinguished scholars to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The period of my life devoted to the study of Polish language and letters thus came to an end, and period of the German occupation began…

“In order to avoid deportation to do forced labor in Germany, I began in the autumn of 1940 to work as a laborer in a stone quarry attached to the Solvay chemical plant” (Gift and Mystery, pages 8 and 9). 

Living in that era of unspeakable cruelty, of disruption of life in general, and of his university education in particular, were Polish priests, religious and lay faithful who courageously bore witness to the power of love. Among them was Franciscan Conventual Father Maximilian Kolbe who, like other Polish priests and religious, protected Jews from the German occupation force. That would earn Kolbe his arrest and deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp. There the guards ruled that if any prisoner escaped, ten innocent prisoners would be put to death in his place. There death sentence was carried out by starvation in a torture box called the “Hunger Bunker.”

        One day, a prisoner escaped, and ten were chosen to be executed. One of the ten, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, “My wife! My children!”

Hearing his cry, Kolbe stepped forward, identified himself as a Catholic priest, and offered himself to be executed in place of this man married with children because, he argued, he was a Catholic priest and older than Gajowniczek.  Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp-commander, agreed.

Into the torture chamber Kolbe was led, and there he spent many days lifting the spirits of the prisoners with prayers and hymns.  He was later killed by being injected with carbolic acid, since he did not die of starvation.

        St Maximilian Kolbe bore witness to the love of God by giving his life so that the life of a fellow prisoner might be spared.  This year, on his feast, our Lord uses the Gospel parable of the unforgiving servant read at Mass to teach us to bear witness to the love of God by forgiving those who wrong us.

        Indeed, to forgive is to die. It is to lay down one’s life for the sake of love. It is to lay down one’s life as a sign of love for the offender. To forgive is to die to self. It is to slay the self that thirsts for revenge. The self is the first thing we must overcome if we are to grow in our relationship with God and neighbor. But the self is the most difficult thing to overcome. The one who forgives offers himself to be executed like Kolbe.

        God himself forgave us by dying. God died on the cross to forgive us. The Son of God laid down his life to forgive us. And this is what we remember each time we offer the holy sacrifice of the Mass, obeying the command of the Son of God who said at the Last Supper before he died to give us life, “Do this in memory of me.” 

If we forget that God laid down his life on the cross to forgive us, if we forget the sacred victim nailed to the cross by our sins, the innocent Son of the Father, we shall, like the Nazis, make victims of others. If we ignore God victimized by man on the cross, if we ignore the divine victim, we shall create human victims.

Years after the martyrdom of Maximillian Kolbe, divine providence made it that young Karol Wojtyla, who, like Kolbe, lived through that era of cruelty became the Pope who would canonize Kolbe.

On October 10, 1982, in his homily at the Mass of Canonization, Pope John Paul II spoke these moving words about the martyrdom of Maximillian Kolbe when he said: “Men saw what happened in the camp at Auschwitz. And even if to their eyes it must have seemed that a companion of their torment ‘dies,’ even if humanly speaking they could consider ‘his departure’ as ‘a disaster,’ nevertheless in their minds this was not simply ‘death.’ Maximilian did not die but ‘gave his life...for his brother.’ In that death, terrible from the human point of view, there was the whole definitive greatness of the human act and of the human choice. He spontaneously offered himself up to death out of love.

“And in this human death of his there was the clear witness borne to Christ: the witness borne in Christ to the dignity of man, to the sanctity of his life, and to the saving power of death in which the power of love is made manifest.

“Precisely for this reason the death of Maximilian Kolbe became a sign of victory. This was victory won over all systematic contempt and hate for man and for what is divine in man—a victory like that won by our Lord Jesus Christ on Calvary.”

 Pope John Paul II’s words represent a declaration of victory in the death of a martyr, victory of love over hatred, of love over death. No doubt, the world today continues to witness cruelty. Within and among nations, the weak are still made victims by the mighty. But St Maximilian Kolbe’s imitation of Christ shows the world that, in the darkness of cruelty, of man’s inhumanity to man, the love of God overpowers the mighty. In ways that we do not understand, the weakness of the Son of God nailed to the cross, the Son who offered his life that we might live, brings down the mighty from their thrones.

At a time when self-centredness is touted as statesmanship, and war mongers posture as peace makers, the martyrdom of St Maximilian Kolbe challenges us to bear witness to love.

Father Anthony Akinwale, OP