Saint Maximilian Kolbe: Lighting a Candle in the Darkness

“Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

John 15:13

On August 14, 1941, a guard in Auschwitz entered a small underground bunker. Inside the bunker were four emaciated men. They were the last remaining survivors of a group that had originally included 10 men. Astonishingly, despite having spent over two weeks in the bunker, deprived of all food and water, these four were still alive. 

The guard who entered the cell carried a syringe filled with carbolic acid. The commanders of the death camp had become impatient. They wanted the men dead and the bunker back. The guard went around injecting each of the men with the lethal poison. 

As he approached one of the four men, that man calmly lifted his arm for the injection. In this, he was simply displaying the same, strange, courageous calmness that he had shown throughout the past two weeks.  

According to witnesses, every time the guards had entered the bunker in the preceding days, that one man had been found quietly standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell. Even more disconcerting was the fact that over the preceding two weeks, instead of the expected shrieks of despair, it was the sound of men singing hymns and praying that had wafted out of the bunker. It was this same, curiously calm man who had initiated and led these unexpected praise and worship sessions. 

The man was St. Maximilian Kolbe, whose feast day we celebrated just days ago on August 14, the anniversary of his murder (martyrdom). 

The Darkness of Auschwitz

It seems fair to say that Auschwitz stands as the single most extreme example, in all of human history, of what happens when humans turn their backs on the truth of the sacredness of human life.  

Tragically, history is riven with examples of massacre and genocide, atrocities against human life and man’s dignity. And yet, it is difficult to think of any other instance of human cruelty that outdoes Auschwitz in terms of the depth, extent, and deliberateness of pure, unadulterated hatred. 

At Auschwitz, all the sophistication of an advanced, industrial civilization was put into the service of the extermination of human beings. This vast death camp was planned with careful forethought and in great detail as the expression of a conscious, sophisticated philosophy of hatred. 

Historians estimate that over a million human beings were ruthlessly massacred within its walls. Whole generations were snuffed out with all the efficiency of a modern factory. 

As Pope St. John Paul II put it in a homily delivered within Auschwitz, this was a place “built for the negation of faith—faith in God and faith in man—and to trample radically not only on love but on all signs of human dignity, of humanity. A place built on hatred and on contempt for man in the name of a crazed ideology. A place built on cruelty.” 

A Candle Within the Darkness

To most who entered Auschwitz, it must have seemed nothing less than a black hole of evil—a place with such a concentrated gravitational field of darkness, that it swallowed all light and all goodness.  

It must have seemed to many who entered there that Auschwitz was definitive proof of the superior power of evil over goodness and of the powerlessness of goodness. 

That is, until St. Maximilian lit his candle in the darkness, thereby scattering the shadows and filling the place with the light of love. 

Remember, St. Maximilian did not end up in that death bunker by chance. His presence there came directly as a result of a voluntary choice—a choice to offer himself up as a victim to save the life of another prisoner. 

After the guards at the camp had discovered that a prisoner had escaped, they decided to choose ten other prisoners to die a slow, painful death as a punishment and a deterrent to others. One of the men chosen was Franciszek Gajowniczek, who, when chosen, cried out that he had a wife and children.  

It was then that St. Maximilian Kolbe spontaneously stepped forward and calmly told the guards that he was a Catholic priest and would take Gajowniczek’s place.  

Now, over 80 years after St. Maximilian’s martyrdom, the names of his Nazi persecutors are forgotten to history. Instead, it is his single act of heroic love that is remembered, contemplated and celebrated by the millions of pilgrims who have travelled to Auschwitz to spend a moment asking St. Maximilian for his guidance and protection. (I have been one of those pilgrims.) 

“I have been here many times,” Pope St. John Paul II told his listeners in his homily at Auschwitz. “So many times! And many times, I have gone down to Maximilian Kolbe’s death cell and kneeled in front of the execution wall and passed among the ruins of the cremation furnaces of Birkenau. It was impossible for me not to come here as Pope.” 

And why? Because “in the place of terrible devastation of humanity and human dignity – there is victory of humanity!” 

The candle that St. Maximilian lit in the darkness is still burning today, reminding us that, in the end, love always triumphs over hatred, life over death. “The death of Maximilian Kolbe became a sign of victory,” said Pope St. John Paul II in the homily at the canonization Mass for St. Maximilian. “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.”

Imitate St. Maximilian!

It is no coincidence that St. Maximilian has been named one of the patron saints of the pro-life movement. 

As Pope St. John Paul II declared in the homily at the canonization Mass for St. Maximilian, in offering up his life for the life of an innocent man, “Father Maximilian Maria Kolbe thus reaffirmed the Creator’s exclusive right over innocent human life. He bore witness to Christ and to love. For the Apostle John writes: ‘By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren’” (1 Jn 3:16). 

The sainted Pope went on to add that, “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.” 

We, too, pride ourselves on being an “advanced” civilization. And yet, in all of the cities of this advanced civilization of ours, there are centers in which the most innocent among us are slaughtered. And increasingly, we are following directly in the footsteps of the Nazi eugenicists, pushing our sick and our elderly towards death, delivered at the hands of our white-coated medical professionals. 

It is true that there are important differences between the Nazi holocaust and our modern holocaust. The Nazi holocaust was driven by hatred, pure and simple. The abortion and euthanasia holocausts are more often driven by despair, loneliness, and indifference: by, as Pope Francis so often puts it, our “throwaway culture.”

But there are also important parallels, beginning with the contempt for human life and the staggering numbers. Unfathomable millions of preborn children have died (been murdered) over the decades of legalized abortion, because we have chosen indifference and despair over the love that builds and binds.

We, Too, Must Lay Down Our Lives

When St. Maximilian was only a young boy, he had a vision of the Blessed Virgin. She presented him with two crowns: a white one, representing the white crown of a life of heroic virtue; and a red one, representing martyrdom. She instructed him to choose. With the precocious enthusiasm that he manifested throughout his life, St. Maximilian reached out and chose both of them.  

St. Maximilian died before the advent of widespread, legalized abortion. However, we can feel confident what he would have thought of it…and what he would have done about it. He would not have stood by indifferently, but rather would have given his life to fight this evil and to bring the light of the Gospel into a world that had embraced the darkness of death. 

We too must be willing to lay down our lives in defense of the dignity of every human life. Not necessarily by means of the red crown of martyrdom, but certainly by choosing the white crown of a life of heroic virtue. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the heroic activities of pro-life activists, who are founding maternity homes for women in crisis pregnancies. This is a difficult and often thankless undertaking. No one who desires fame or riches or comfort spends years of their life laboring in this work. But in doing this work, these pro-life activists are following in the footsteps of St. Maximilian. They are lighting a candle in the darkness. They are putting into action the words of Christ, Who exhorted His followers to love their neighbors with a love like His – a love that is faithful unto death. 

There are so many other ways that pro-life heroes are bringing love into the world, scattering the shadows of hatred, cruelty and indifference.  

In this world, it too often seems to be the case that evil has triumphed, and goodness is impotently striving simply to slow down the advances of evil. The example of St. Maximilian reminds us of the immense power of a single act of self-sacrificial, Christ-like love. In this, he was only imitating his Master, Who saved the world by an ignominious death on the cross. 

But that, of course, was not the end of the story. For on the other side of this death of His was the Resurrection.