Universalis: Today

Thursday 14 August 2008
Saint Maximilian Kolbe, priest, Martyr

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Tomorrow: The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
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Come, let us worship the Lord, for he is our God.

St Maximilian Kolbe (1894 - 1941): He was born on 8 January 1894 in occupied Poland: he joined the Franciscans in Lwów in 1910, and was ordained eight years later, as his country became free and independent for the first time in over 120 years.
He believed that the world was passing through a time of intense spiritual crisis, and that Christians must fight for the world’s salvation with all the means of modern communication. He founded a newspaper, and a sodality called the Knights of Mary Immaculate, which spread widely both in Poland and abroad.
In 1927 he founded a community, a “city of Mary,” at Teresin: centred round the Franciscan friary, it attracted many lay people, and became self-supporting, publishing many periodicals and running its own radio station.
In 1930 he went to Japan, studied Buddhism and Shintoism, and through the Japanese edition of his newspaper spread the Christian message in a way that was in harmony with Japanese culture. In Nagasaki, he set up a “Garden of the Immaculate,” which survived the atomic bomb.
He also travelled to Malabar and to Moscow, but was recalled to Poland in 1936 for reasons of health.
When the Germans invaded in 1939, the community at Teresin sheltered thousands of refugees, most of them Jews.
In 1941 he was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, where he helped and succoured the inmates. In August of that year a prisoner escaped, and in reprisal the authorities were choosing ten people to die by starvation. One of the men had a family, and Maximilian Kolbe offered to take his place. The offer was accepted, and he spent his last days comforting his fellow prisoners.
The man he saved was present at his canonisation.

Maximilian Kolbe’s martyrdom is the least important thing about him. We are none of us likely to find ourselves in a position to emulate his sacrifice, and speculation as to the heroic way in which we would have behaved in his place is a pernicious waste of time. What is important is that he acted the way he did because of who he was – or, rather, because of who he had become. It is because of who he had become that we revere him as a saint: he would have been a saint (though perhaps not canonised) even if he had not been martyred. And that process of becoming is something we can all emulate. We can all become people for whom doing the right thing is obvious, natural, and easy. It requires no heroism, no special gifts: just perseverance, and prayer.

Mid-morning reading (Terce)	Wisdom 19:22 ©
Lord, in every way you have made your people great and glorious. You have never disdained them, but stood by them always and everywhere.

Noon reading (Sext)	Deuteronomy 4:7 ©
What great nation is there that has its gods so near as the Lord our God is to us whenever we call to him?

Afternoon reading (None)	Esther 10:3 ©
The single nation, mine, is Israel, those who cried out to God and were saved. Yes, the Lord has saved his people, the Lord has delivered us from all these evils, God has worked such signs and great wonders as have never happened among the nations.

August 2008
Thu 28	Saint Augustine, Bishop, Doctor
Fri 29	The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
Sat 30	Saturday of week 21 of the year
Sun 31	22nd Sunday of the year
September 2008
Mon 1	Monday of week 22 of the year
Tue 2
Wed 3	Saint Gregory the Great, Pope, Doctor
Thu 4
Fri 5

Calendar used: General Calendar

Scripture readings taken from the Jerusalem Bible, published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet web site at http://www.randomhouse.com.

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