Homily for Memorial of St. Maximilian Kolbe

Homily for the Memorial of
St. Maximilian Kolbe

August 14, 2019

Collect
Salesian & Lay Missioners Retreat, Don Bosco Retreat Center, Haverstraw, N.Y.

The Collect today calls our attention to 2 characteristics of St. Maximilian Kolbe, viz., his “burning love for the Immaculate Virgin Mary” and his “zeal for souls and love of neighbor.”  These are qualities that every Salesian can identify with.

Maximilian joined the Conventual Franciscans in his youth and dedicated his priestly ministry to preaching and using the press to catechize the lower, less literate classes of Polish society and to spread devotion to Mary Immaculate.  Later his zeal for souls took him to Japan to carry out these ministries as a missionary.  He and his confreres had not only to learn Japanese but also to set up the printing press they’d brought from Poland to compose with Japanese characters.

In the late 1930s Fr. Maximilian returned to Poland and his thriving Franciscan convent and its ministries.  But after World War II began and the Germans occupied Poland in 1939, Catholic media were shut down, and before the year was out, the Gestapo came for Fr. Maximilian and his confreres.  The Nazis were as intent on eventually exterminating the Poles—whom they considered Slavic inferiors—almost as much as they went after Jews.  Their 1st targets were Polish leaders, such as academics, priests, and army officers. 

So, thousands of priests and religious were sent to various camps and prisons, such as Auschwitz and Dachau, including most of our confreres at the province offices and St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish in Krakow, whose youth ministry helped shape the faith of their young parishioner Karol Wojtyla and, eventually, his vocation.  All of those confreres perished in the camps, several have their cause as martyrs underway, and as you know Fr. Joseph Kowalski, parish priest and provincial secretary, has been beatified.  Another victim of the Nazis was Fr. Steve Plywaczyk, whom many of us older confreres were privileged to know.  After his practical training at Ramsey, he’d returned to Poland and in 1940 was director-pastor of the Salesian orphanage and parish at Plock.  Fr. Steve survived his imprisonment and the medical experiments carried out on him at Dachau.  Our confrere Cardinal Hlond was driven into exile, and in 1944 was captured in France and interned in Germany until the U.S. Army liberated him—a story given ample coverage in the Don Bosco Messenger, early U.S. version of the Salesian Bulletin.

Eventually the Nazis killed 6 bishops, over 2,000 priests, and hundreds of male and female religious; in all, about 6 million Poles, half of them Jewish.

Nevertheless, in 1940 Fr. Maximilian and his fellow Franciscans were released and resumed their pastoral care, which included thousands of refugees from other parts of Poland, as well as desperate Jews.  Fr. Kolbe’s family was of German heritage; the Nazis offered him German citizenship and better rations if he would agree not to minister any longer to Poles.  He refused.  And in 1941 he was arrested and imprisoned again, subjected to very harsh treatment particularly because he was a priest.

In prison camp, Fr. Maximilian heard confessions regularly, tho it was against the regulations, shared his meager food rations, and encouraged his companions as much as possible.  All of that amply demonstrated his zeal for souls and love of neighbor.  That love culminated in his well-known substitution of himself for another prisoner condemned to death by starvation.  A prisoner had escaped, and in retaliation the Germans picked 10 prisoners to die.  In the starvation bunker, Fr. Maximilian kept up the spirits of the other 9 men until they died one by one.  When only he was left, the bunker was needed for another lot of victims, so the Germans gave him a lethal injection on August 14 and burned his body along with others.

In our own time, with greater freedom than the Poles had but in a more secular peacetime environment, we can, like St. Maximilian, draw inspiration and strength from Mary Immaculate, who was Don Bosco’s Madonna in the early days of the Oratory.  It was her statue that Don Bosco set up in the Pinardi chapel, where it remains today; her statue that adorns the dome of the Mary Help of Christians Basilica; she who inspired Dominic Savio to gather a sodality of young apostles that became the seedbed of the Salesian Congregation; she to whom Don Bosco pointed when he promoted purity for both youngsters and Salesians.

Obviously, St. Maximilian also models for us zeal for souls in practical love for our neighbor, defense of the weak and those discriminated against, attention to the least in society, the use of mass media and social media to spread the Gospel and catechize, and the exercise of our priestly, religious, or missionary ministry.

St. Maximilian Kolbe is a saint for this age of secularism, of massive discrimination and genocide, of such great need for education, catechesis, and evangelization, of the world’s need for the motherly image of Mary, model of purity, self-giving, and submission to God’s will.