This morning Saint Maximilian Kolbe, my local parish’s patron saint, a Polish Conventual Franciscan friar who was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, was honored with a special Mass.
The story of Saint Maximilian takes us back to WWII and the Auschwitz concentration camp. After a prisoner escaped, the Commandant selected ten men from Maximilian Kolbe’s barracks to be starved to death as punishment. A young man with a family was among those chosen to die. He cried out in grief, mourning the fate of his wife and children should he be executed. Maximilian, hearing his pleas, offered his life in place of the condemned man. The caring Franciscan lived according to the scriptures, especially John 15, verses 12 and 13:
This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
In 1982 the Blessed John Paul II canonized Maximilian Kolbe and recognized his selfless love. In attendance was the prisoner whose life Saint Maximilian saved, Franciszek Gajowniczek.
Years later I directed the fundraising film for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum titled “A Campaign to Remember.” In making the film I was privileged to interview survivors one-on-one. This included a survivor who was “adopted”—and thus hidden from the Nazis—by a Catholic family. I still vividly recall him description of exiting the church after Mass, just outside the walls of Auschwitz where his family perished, the same camp where Saint Maximilian was martyred.
The stories survivors humbly shared with me contributed immensely to my passion to seek effective ways of bringing peace to the world—a passion for making sure we never again experience such horrors. Those interviews contributed greatly to my motivation for writing Taming the Wolf. During the Mass today these interlinked memories breathed new life into my commitment to develop peacemaking based on the legacy of Saint Francis.
So today I invite and solicit your prayers of petition—prayers that the world catches on fire with a passion to “tame the wolf” roaming the planet in anger.
