August 14, 2026
Memorial of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Priest and Martyr
Lectionary: 417
Reading 1
The word of the LORD came to me:
Son of man, make known to Jerusalem her abominations.
Thus says the Lord GOD to Jerusalem:
By origin and birth you are of the land of Canaan;
your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.
As for your birth, the day you were born your navel cord was not cut;
you were neither washed with water nor anointed,
nor were you rubbed with salt, nor swathed in swaddling clothes.
No one looked on you with pity or compassion
to do any of these things for you.
Rather, you were thrown out on the ground as something loathsome,
the day you were born.
Then I passed by and saw you weltering in your blood.
I said to you: Live in your blood and grow like a plant in the field.
You grew and developed, you came to the age of puberty;
your breasts were formed, your hair had grown,
but you were still stark naked.
Again I passed by you and saw that you were now old enough for love.
So I spread the corner of my cloak over you to cover your nakedness;
I swore an oath to you and entered into a covenant with you;
you became mine, says the Lord GOD.
Then I bathed you with water, washed away your blood,
and anointed you with oil.
I clothed you with an embroidered gown,
put sandals of fine leather on your feet;
I gave you a fine linen sash and silk robes to wear.
I adorned you with jewelry: I put bracelets on your arms,
a necklace about your neck, a ring in your nose,
pendants in your ears, and a glorious diadem upon your head.
Thus you were adorned with gold and silver;
your garments were of fine linen, silk, and embroidered cloth.
Fine flour, honey, and oil were your food.
You were exceedingly beautiful, with the dignity of a queen.
You were renowned among the nations for your beauty, perfect as it was,
because of my splendor which I had bestowed on you,
says the Lord GOD.
But you were captivated by your own beauty,
you used your renown to make yourself a harlot,
and you lavished your harlotry on every passer-by,
whose own you became.
Yet I will remember the covenant I made with you when you were a girl,
and I will set up an everlasting covenant with you,
that you may remember and be covered with confusion,
and that you may be utterly silenced for shame
when I pardon you for all you have done, says the Lord GOD.
Or:
Thus says the LORD:
I will deal with you according to what you have done,
you who despised your oath, breaking a covenant.
Yet I will remember the covenant I made with you when you were a girl,
and I will set up an everlasting covenant with you.
Then you shall remember your conduct and be ashamed
when I take your sisters, those older and younger than you,
and give them to you as daughters,
even though I am not bound by my covenant with you.
For I will re-establish my covenant with you,
that you may know that I am the LORD,
that you may remember and be covered with confusion,
and that you may be utterly silenced for shame
when I pardon you for all you have done, says the Lord GOD.
Responsorial Psalm
R. (1c) You have turned from your anger.
God indeed is my savior;
I am confident and unafraid.
My strength and my courage is the LORD,
and he has been my savior.
With joy you will draw water
at the fountain of salvation.
R. You have turned from your anger.
Give thanks to the LORD, acclaim his name;
among the nations make known his deeds,
proclaim how exalted is his name.
R. You have turned from your anger.
Sing praise to the LORD for his glorious achievement;
let this be known throughout all the earth.
Shout with exultation, O city of Zion,
for great in your midst
is the Holy One of Israel!
R. You have turned from your anger.
Alleluia
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Receive the word of God, not as the word of men,
but, as it truly is, the word of God.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Some Pharisees approached Jesus, and tested him, saying,
"Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?"
He said in reply, "Have you not read that from the beginning
the Creator made them male and female and said,
For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother
and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?
So they are no longer two, but one flesh.
Therefore, what God has joined together, man must not separate."
They said to him, "Then why did Moses command
that the man give the woman a bill of divorce and dismiss her?"
He said to them, "Because of the hardness of your hearts
Moses allowed you to divorce your wives,
but from the beginning it was not so.
I say to you, whoever divorces his wife
(unless the marriage is unlawful)
and marries another commits adultery."
His disciples said to him,
"If that is the case of a man with his wife,
it is better not to marry."
He answered, "Not all can accept this word,
but only those to whom that is granted.
Some are incapable of marriage because they were born so;
some, because they were made so by others;
some, because they have renounced marriage
for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven.
Whoever can accept this ought to accept it."
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/081426.cfm
Commentary on
Ezekiel 16:1-15,60,63 or Ezekiel 16:59-63
(Note: Today’s First Reading speaks in rather explicit
language about childbirth and prostitution. There is an alternative First
Reading commentary below for those who might find the longer reading offensive
or ‘indelicate’.)
Ezekiel 16:1-15,60,63
Today we have a rather striking allegorical history of
Israel. In summary, Israel is seen as the unfaithful partner of Yahweh, a
‘prostitute’ to alien gods. This is a familiar image in prophetic literature
from Hosea onwards. Ezekiel develops it in a long allegory (resumed in another
form in chap 23) surveying the whole history of Israel. As in Hosea, this
allegory ends with a free pardon from the husband who establishes a new
covenant, thus prefiguring the marriage of God with his people in messianic
days—a theme which is taken up in the New Testament.
In a touching and progressing series of images the prophet
describes how God chose his people, cared for them, showered them with all they
needed and much more and how in the end they ungratefully abused all they had
received. In spite of that, he will not abandon them.
God describes himself as the spouse of Israel, who turns out
to be an utterly unfaithful partner, prostituting herself (often literally)
before false gods. The purpose of the allegory is for Ezekiel to confront
Jerusalem with the terrible things she has been doing.
First, she is reminded of her pagan and idolatrous origins:
Your origin and your birth were in the land of the
Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.
The “land of Canaan” was roughly equivalent to Lebanon and
Israel today. The Amorites were pre-Israelite, Semitic inhabitants of
Palestine; the Hittites were non-Semitic residents of Canaan who had flourished
in Asia Minor before 1000 BC. In biblical tradition, Amorites and Hittites
refer generally to the pre-Israelite population. They are seen as different
from Israel, which traced its origins through Abraham to Nahor.
Jerusalem had, therefore, a centuries-old, pre-Israelite
history and the city for a long time resisted conquest by the Israelites. It
did not come fully under Israelite rule until David’s time. (Perhaps a matter
for reflection here on the mutual rights of Israelis and Palestinians today.)
To return to the allegory, as the city-state Jerusalem
matures, the people have slowly adopted and often preferred the cultural
appropriation of neighboring rituals and practices to its own Hebrew faith in Yawheh.
Ezekiel struggles with many tensions. For example, as a postexilic (i.e. the
period of Jewish history following the Babylonian captivity) work of sacred
writing, it highlights the rift between the ‘people of the land’ and the
‘people of the exile’ as two competing groups representing those who stayed
behind in Jerusalem and those who returned after several decades living under
foreign occupation in Babylon.
This book of the prophet Ezekiel, in contrast to that of
Isaiah, for example, is comfortable with anti-foreigner rhetoric. Israel has
lost its way under the influence of its neighbors with foreign religious
practices. The strong language in this chapter is a lamentation in the form of
contempt for non Jewish worship of the Lord.
It is helpful to remember that the Bible is always in
conversation with itself. If Ezekiel is anti-foreigner, you can find more
abundant opposite sentiments in other places within Scripture. For example, the
book of Isaiah will emphasise that “all peoples” will be gathered to the
mountain of the Lord in Jerusalem for a rich wedding banquet:
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all
peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. (Is
25:6)
There is also the example of Rahab, herself a prostitute and
foreigner in the Book of Joshua. Rahab is depicted as a heroine for Israel and
for its belief in the one God when she saves the Hebrew spies from the hands of
their enemies (see Josh: 2:1-7).
Today’s allegory with Ezekiel, in many ways can be applied
to our own Church and its evolution from Gentile and pagan beginnings in so
many parts of the world. We too have been blessed with an extraordinary
cornucopia of spiritual and cultural richness over the centuries. But we have
also perhaps at times allowed ourselves to be overly evangelized by a dominant
secular culture rather than allow the Gospel to shift and challenge the world
around us.
This allegory has much to say to us. Let us not just read it
as a condemnation of pre-monotheistic Jerusalem, but as a salutary reminder for
our own relationship with our loving God.
Ezekiel 16:59-63
The alternative First Reading is taken from the end of the
same passage as the longer reading, but focuses on its conclusion. So to better
understand its significance, it is helpful to have read the longer reading.
On the one hand, Jerusalem will be treated as she deserves
for breaking her covenant with God. She will be destroyed and her people taken
away into bitter exile in Babylon.
But God will not forget his people. He will remember the
covenant he made in “the days of your youth”, i.e. when the covenant was first
made at Mount Sinai, and God will now make a covenant that will last forever.
Jerusalem will then be reduced to a speechless silence of
remorse for her faithlessness. He says:
Then you will remember your ways and be ashamed when you
receive your older and younger sisters and I give them to you as daughters, but
not on account of my covenant with you.
“Older and younger sisters” refers to Samaria and Sodom
which came under the rule of Jerusalem.
In spite of everything, Yahweh’s people will be pardoned and
the covenant will be renewed. On her part, Jerusalem will remember with shame
and repentance the terrible things she has done.
We, too, provided we have genuine repentance and long to be
reconciled again with our Lord in love, can be sure that God’s love and
compassion will be poured over us.
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Commentary on
Matthew 19:3-12
We return now, after the discourse on the Church, to a
narrative section which describes Jesus’ ministry in Judaea and Jerusalem. He
is no longer in the north, in Galilee, but in the south. We are now entering
the sixth section of Matthew’s Gospel, which will conclude with the parables of
the last times.
Today’s passage begins with a discussion about a contentious
issue between Jesus and the Pharisees, an issue which continues to be
contentious in our own time. The question in itself is straightforward, but as
was often the case, it was thrown at Jesus to test his orthodoxy with regard to
the Law. The Pharisees ask:
Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?
Among the Jews there were two schools of thought on divorce.
The school of Shammai would only allow marital unfaithfulness as a
justification for divorce. The Hillel school, however, would allow a man to
divorce his wife if she did anything he did not like, such as burning his food!
Jesus clearly sides with the first interpretation.
Using two passages from the creation story in the book of
Genesis, Jesus gives an uncompromising reply which it would be difficult for
his opponents to challenge:
Have you not read that the one who made them at the
beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall
leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become
one flesh’?
Jesus goes on to say,
So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what
God has joined together, let no one separate.
And in a good marriage, the two becoming one flesh is a
reality. It is in the death of one partner where this can become very clear.
Marriage, therefore, as the intimate bonding of a man and
woman, is part of God’s plan for the human race; it is not something to be
undone by us. However, the Pharisees are not satisfied with this answer. They
press their case further by asking:
Why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of
dismissal and to divorce her?
Jesus replies that that was simply a concession to the
‘unteachability’ of the people in his own time, but that it was not the
situation from the beginning:
It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses
allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.
The purpose of the writ was obviously to formalise a
separation and allow a husband to enter into another marriage.
On the other hand, the one example of requiring a writ for a
divorced woman in the book of Deuteronomy (24:1-4), suggests that this recorded
document served to protect the woman herself in a society where the most
vulnerable included the orphan, the stranger in the land (i.e. foreigner) and
the widow. A single woman required standing within the community and would need
protection in several forms to escape ridicule or ostracization.
Jesus says:
…whoever divorces his wife…and marries another commits
adultery…
Nothing is said of the woman who might divorce; in a patriarchal
and male-dominated world this would have been far less common, if not
impossible. The woman had very little say in such matters. (However, in Mark’s
version [10:2-12] of this passage, both husbands and wives are included. He was
writing for a gentile audience where the rules were somewhat different.)
There is, however, an exception mentioned only by Matthew
which has caused problems for interpreters of biblical text and moral
theologians. He has Jesus give “sexual immorality” (in the NRSVue translation
of the Bible) as one possible reason justifying divorce. The problem is that
the word Matthew uses—porneia (Greek)—is not clear in its meaning.
It is variously translated as ‘fornication’, ‘lewd conduct’, ‘unchastity’
‘unfaithfulness’, or ‘marital unfaithfulness’—and it seems to apply only to the
wife. Regardless, though an exception appears to come forth, it does not change
the teaching on divorce as prohibited in general because the disciples continue
to focus on the impossibility of marriage without an option out of this
covenantal bond.
That there is no ‘out’ or exit from this union between
husband and wife is a good way to understand the theological message of this
passage on divorce. Jesus wishes to emphasise the covenant between God and his
people through the analogy of groom and bride. As a people, there might be a
‘divorce’ or turning away from God’s teaching and following Jesus. However, it
becomes clear that the ‘groom’, i.e. Jesus, will never turn away from his
disciples.
In our secular societies, unfaithfulness as well as many
lesser reasons are given for justifying a legal divorce. If the original
contract is known to be valid, the Catholic Church does not recognize any
reason for its termination. However, in these times, divorce is not always the
result of one partner’s decision. It is often the result of the mutual
breakdown of the marriage relationship where the partners can no longer live
together with mutual love and respect, but rather where there are
irreconcilable mutual feelings of hostility and unhappiness.
In any case, Jesus’ position was seen by his own disciples
as rather severe. If things were the way he saw them, then they thought it
would be better not to get married at all! Jesus makes a statement which
perhaps we should listen to more carefully than we often do. While, on the one
hand, he lays down a clear principle, he also indicates that not everyone may
have the strength to observe it:
Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to
whom it is given.
There seems to be a call, then, for some compassion and
flexibility in implementation.
Jesus goes on to describe those:
…who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the
kingdom of heaven.
This group can include either those, who like Paul, choose
to live celibate lives in order to work for the Kingdom and the gospel, or
those whose marriages have broken down for one reason or another and choose to
remain celibate for the rest of their lives, also for the sake of the gospel.
This last does not seem to be a universal requirement:
Let anyone accept this who can.
Marriage is seen here very much linked to the call to work
for the Kingdom. If it is an obstacle, it should be avoided; if not, then one
can and should work for the Kingdom through one’s marriage. Or, in Pauline thought,
if this union furthers your devotion to following Christ as a disciple, then
get married, but if it hinders that devotion you may have to reconsider it.
Again, “let anyone accept this who can.”
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Friday,
August 14, 2026
Ordinary Time
Opening Prayer
Almighty and ever-living God,
your Spirit made us your children, confident to call you Father.
Increase your Spirit within us and bring us to our
promised inheritance. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who
lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Gospel Reading - Matthew 19: 3-12
Some Pharisees approached Jesus,
and to put him to the test they said, 'Is it against the Law for a man to
divorce his wife on any pretext whatever?' He answered, 'Have you not read that
the Creator from the beginning made them male and female and that he said: This
is why a man leaves his father and mother and becomes attached to his wife, and
the two become one flesh? They are no longer two, therefore, but one flesh. So
then, what God has united, human beings must not divide.'
They said to him, 'Then why did
Moses command that a writ of dismissal should be given in cases of divorce?'
He said to
them, 'It was because you were so hard-hearted, that Moses allowed you to
divorce your wives, but it was not like this from the beginning. Now I say this
to you: anyone who divorces his wife -- I am not speaking of an illicit
marriage -- and marries another, is guilty of adultery.'
The disciples said to him, 'If
that is how things are between husband and wife, it is advisable not to marry.'
But he
replied, 'It is not everyone who can accept what I have said, but only those to
whom it is granted. There are eunuchs born so from their mother's womb, there
are eunuchs made so by human agency and there are eunuchs who have made
themselves so for the sake of the kingdom of Heaven. Let anyone accept this who
can.'
Reflection
•
Context. Up to chapter 18 Matthew has shown how
the discourses of Jesus have marked the different phases of the progressive
constitution and formation of the community of disciples around their Master.
Now in chapter 19: 1 this small group withdraws from the territory of Galilee
and arrives in the territories of Judaea. The call of Jesus that involves his
disciples advances more until the decisive choice: the acceptance or rejection
of the person of Jesus. Such a phase takes place along the road that leads to
Jerusalem (chapters 19-20), and finally with the arrival in the city and to the
Temple (chapters 21-23). All the encounters that Jesus experiences in the
course of these chapters take place along this journey from Galilee to
Jerusalem.
•
The encounter with the Pharisees. Passing
through Trans-Jordanian (19: 1) the first encounter is with the Pharisees and
the theme of the discussion of Jesus with them becomes a reason for reflection
for the group of the disciples. The question of the Pharisees concerns divorce
and places Jesus in difficulty, particularly, the more solid and stable reality
for every Jewish community. The intervention of the Pharisees wants to accuse
Jesus because of his teaching. It is a question of a true process: Matthew
considers it as “testing him”, “a way of tempting him”. The question is really
a crucial one: “Is it against the Law for a man to divorce his wife on any
pretext whatsoever?” (19: 3). The awkward malicious attempt of the Pharisees to
interpret the text of DT 24, 1 to place Jesus in difficulty does not escape the
attention of the reader: “Suppose a man has taken a wife and consummated the
marriage, but she has not pleased him and he has found some impropriety of
which to accuse her, he has, therefore, made out a writ of divorce for her and
handed it to her and then dismissed her from his house”. This text had given
place, throughout the centuries, to innumerable discussions: to admit divorce
for any reason whatsoever; to request a minimum of bad behavior, a true
adultery.
•
It is God who unites. Jesus responds to the
Pharisees having recourse to Gn 1: 17: 2: 24, which presents the question about
the primary will of God, the Creator. The love that unites man to woman, comes
from God and because
of its origin, it unifies and cannot be separated. If Jesus
quotes Gn 2: 24: “This is why a man leaves his father and mother and becomes
attached to his wife and they become one flesh” (19: 5), it is because he wants
to underline a particular and absolute principle: it is the creating will of
God that unites man and woman. When a man and a woman unite together in
marriage, it is God who unites them; the term “coniugi” - couple – comes from the verb joined together, to unite,
that is to say, that the joining together of the two partners sexually is the
effect of the creative word of God. The response of Jesus to the Pharisees
reaches its summit: marriage is indissoluble from its original constitution.
Jesus continues this time drawing from Ml 2: 13-16: to repudiate the wife is to
break the covenant with God and according to the prophets this covenant has to
be lived, above all, by the spouses in their conjugal union (Ho 1-3; Is 1: 21-26;
Jr 2: 2; 3: 1, 6-12; Ez 16; 23; Is 54: 6-10, 60-62). The response of Jesus
appears as a contradiction to the Law of Moses which grants the possibility to
grant a writ of divorce. To motivate his response Jesus reminds the Pharisees:
if Moses gave this possibility, it is because you were so hardhearted (v. 8),
more concrete, because of your indocility to the Word of God. The Law of Gn 1:
26; 2: 24 had never been modified, but Moses was obliged to adapt it to an
attitude of indocility. The first marriage was not annulled by adultery. To
contemporary man and particularly, to the ecclesial community the word of Jesus
clearly says that there should be no divorces; and, just the same, we see that
there are; in pastoral life the divorced persons are accepted, to whom the
possibility of entering into the Kingdom is always open. The reaction of the
disciples is immediate: “If that is how things are between husband and wife, it
is advisable not to marry” (v. 10). The response of Jesus continues to sustain
the indissolubility of matrimony, impossible for the human mentality but
possible for God. The eunuch of whom Jesus speaks is not the one who is unable
to generate but the one, who separated from his wife, continues to live in
continence, he remains faithful to the first conjugal bond: he is an eunuch as
regards all other women.
Personal Questions
•
As regards marriage do we know how to accept the
teaching of Jesus with simplicity, without adapting it to our own legitimate
choices to be comfortable?
•
The evangelical passage has reminded us that the
design of the Father on man and on woman is a wonderful project of love. Are
you aware that love has an essential law: it implies the total and full gift of
one’s own person to the other?
Concluding Prayer
God, create in me a clean heart,
renew within me a resolute spirit, do not thrust me away from your presence, do
not take away from me your spirit of holiness.
(Ps 51: 10-11)
Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Priest and Martyr
Maximilian Kolbe was born with the name Rajmund on 8
January, 1894, in Zduńska Wola, which was at that time part of the Russian
Empire. Rajmund was the second son of Julius Kolbe and Maria Dabrowska. His
father was an ethnic German and his mother of Polish origin. He had four
brothers, two of whom died very young. His parents moved to Pabianice where
they worked first as weavers. Later his mother worked as a midwife (often
without charge) and ran a grocery and household goods shop in part of her
rented house. Julius Kolbe worked at weaving mills and also grew vegetables on
a rented lot. In 1914, he joined Józef Piłsudski’s Polish Legions fighting for
Poland’s independence from Russia and was captured. Regarded as a Russian
subject, he was hanged as a traitor in 1914, at the age of forty-three.
In 1907, Rajmund and his elder brother Francis decided to
join the Conventual Franciscans. They illegally crossed the border between
Russia and Austria-Hungary and joined a Conventual Franciscan junior seminary
in Lwów. In 1910, Kolbe entered the novitiate. He professed his first vows in
1911.
In 1912, he was sent to Kraków and then on to Rome where he
took final vows in 1914, adopting the names Maximilian Maria, to show his
veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In Rome he studied philosophy, theology,
mathematics, and physics. He took a great interest in astrophysics and the
prospect of space flight and the military. While in Rome he designed an
airplane-like spacecraft, similar in concept to the eventual space shuttle, and
tried to patent it. In 1918, he was ordained a priest. In 1915, he earned a
doctorate in philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and in 1919, a
doctorate in theology at the Pontifical University of St Bonaventure. During
his time as a student, he witnessed demonstrations by Freemasons against Popes
Pius X and Benedict XV. This inspired him to organize the Militia
Immaculatae (Army of Mary) to work for the conversion of sinners and
enemies of the Catholic Church, through the intercession of the Virgin Mary.
In 1919, he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis and
returned to a newly independent Poland. Here his main work was teaching Church
history in a seminary. After another attack of tuberculosis, he had printing
presses installed at Niepokalanow, near Warsaw. Here Maximilian founded a
Franciscan community which combined prayer, cheerfulness and simplicity of life
with modern technology, as well as a seminary, a radio station and several
other organisations and publications. He was also very active in promoting the
veneration of the Immaculate Virgin Mary. His movement published its own
magazine with the same name (Militia Immaculatae), in which he
particularly condemned Freemasonry, Communism, Zionism, Capitalism and
Imperialism. Not long after the presses were moved to Grodno, and circulation
increased to 45,000. Because of this, new machines had to be installed.
Between 1930 and 1936, he went on a series of missions to
Japan, where he founded a friary on the outskirts of Nagasaki, a Japanese
newspaper, and a seminary. (Interestingly, and against local advice, because
the friary was not built on the ‘propitious’ side of the mountain, it was
spared the devastation caused by the atomic bomb in 1945.) After founding
another community at Nagasaki, Maximilian was recalled in 1936, to be the
superior of Niepokalanow, which then grew to number 762 friars.
When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Kolbe, realising
that his monastery would be taken over, sent most of the friars home, warning
them not to join the underground resistance. During the Second World War, the
friary provided shelter to refugees from Greater Poland, including 3,000 Poles
and 1,500 Jews. Maximilian was also active as an amateur radio operator,
attacking Nazi activities through his reports. For some time, his newspapers
continued publication, taking a patriotic, independent line, critical of the
Third Reich. Kolbe, who had refused German citizenship, was finally arrested on
17 February, 1941, as a journalist, publisher and ‘intellectual’. Gestapo
officers were shown round the whole friary and were astonished at the small amount
of food prepared for the friars. He was imprisoned in the Pawiak prison, and on
25 May was transferred to Auschwitz I as prisoner #16670. In the camp the heavy
work of moving loads of heavy logs at double speed was enforced by kicks and
lashes. Maximilian also had to remove the bodies of those who died of torture.
At the same time, he continued his priestly ministry, hearing confessions in
unlikely places and smuggling in bread and wine to celebrate the Eucharist. He
was noted for his sympathy and compassion towards those even more unfortunate
than himself.
In July 1941, a prisoner from Kolbe’s barracks vanished,
prompting the deputy camp commander to pick 10 men from the same barracks to be
starved to death in the notorious Block 13 as punishment for his escape. In
fact, the man was found later to have drowned, perhaps deliberately, in the
camp latrine.)
Franciszek Gajowniczek, one of the men selected by the camp
commander, cried out in distress at having been chosen, and Maximilian
volunteered to take his place. He stepped forward, saying:
I am a Catholic priest. I wish to die for that man. I am
old; he has a wife and children.
During days working in the death chamber of Cell 18, he led
his companions in songs and prayer. After three weeks of dehydration and
starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. He was finally put to
death on 14 August, 1941, with an injection of carbolic acid.
Maximilian Kolbe was beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1971, and
canonized on 10 October, 1982, by Pope John Paul II, a former archbishop of
Kracov, the diocese where Auschwitz was located. Among those present was
Franciszek Gajowniczek, the man whose place Kolbe had taken.
Maximilian Kolbe is the patron saint of drug addicts,
political prisoners, families, journalists, prisoners and the pro-life
movement. Pope John Paul II also declared him the “Patron Saint of Our
Difficult Century”. Kolbe is one of ten 20th-century martyrs depicted in
statues above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey, London.
Franciszek Gajowniczek died on March 13, 1995, at Brzeg in
Poland, 95 years old—53 years after Kolbe had saved him. But he was never to
forget the ragged monk. After his release from Auschwitz, Gajowniczek spent the
next five decades paying homage to Father Kolbe, honoring the man who died on
his behalf.
In December 1994, the 94-year-old Pole visited St Maximilian
Kolbe Catholic Church in Houston, Texas. His translator on that trip, Chaplain
Thaddeus Horbowy, said:
He told me that as long as he “has breath in his lungs”,
he would consider it his duty to tell people about the heroic act of love by
Maximilian Kolbe.
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