A Good God is Everywhere — And Provides for Everything with Love

The best recounting of the sacrifice of Maximilian Kolbe I've ever read.  Excerpts:

...The Nazi commandant calls the first name, second, third, fourth. Franciszek Gajowniczek hopes hard that he would live to see 42… live to hold his children close again…seventh, eighth, ninth names…”

He’s only a few years older than I am. And he’s only one name away from seeing the sun rise tomorrow. We turn at Bobby Johnson’s corner.

“And then they barked the tenth name: Franciszek Gajowniczek. And Gajowniczek — he falls to the ground. Near starving, he peels back every shred of dignity and he flat out begs, ‘No, I am married! I have children! I am young! I beg of you!’

The kids are quiet.

“And behind Gajowniczek, a man breaks rank… And he steps forward so all can see his face —- Maximillian Kolbe — a Christian. A Christian who was known to give up his food rations to those less hungry than he was. A Christian known to give his blanket to those not as cold as he was. Maximilian Kolbe, he was known to these incarcerated Jews as the Christ of Auschwitz… and he steps forwards silently, takes off his cap, and before the commandant he says,

“Let me take his place. He has a wife and children. I am not married. I am not a father. He is young. I am old. Take me.” I turn around so that I can see the kids’ faces. “Maximilian Kolbe was only 6 years older than Gajowniczek — 47.”

Hope turns from me, looks out the window. Rain drops start to splat the windshield loud.

“And Gajowniczek, laying there on the dust on a July morning, he would later say, ‘I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on.’

And Kolbe, he was dragged off to a wire box like a dog kennel with the nine other men, left to starve.”

This is always the part of the story that gets hard, when the lump grows too large in my throat. The children say nothing and I push the words past the stinging in my throat.

“Kolbe spent the next 14 days singing hymns and praying with those nine other men, as one by one, all of them starved to death… And only one month prior to Kolbe being dragged off to starve, on June 15, 1941, — Maximilian Kolbe had written this to his mother:

‘Dear Mama, I am in the camp of Auschwitz. Everything is well in my regard. Be tranquil about me and about my health, because the good God is everywhere and provides for everything with love.’”

I had memorized that line of the letter. Because if a man in the midst of one the most hideous scenarios known in the history of the world could write a line like that — not from a bad day at the office or a hard day with the kids, but from the death stench of Auschwitz — how can anyone deny this ultimate iron-clad testimony : A Good God is everywhere — and provides for everything with love...

Her kids' reaction here. A reaction from the man whose life he saved. Excerpts:

...Gajowniczek later recalled:

'I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some dream?

I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian Kolbe. I was saved. And I owe to him the fact that I could tell you all this. The news quickly spread all round the camp. It was the first and the last time that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.

For a long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.'...

St. Maximilian Kolbe, Martyr for charity, pray for us!

Survivors of the Atom Bombs

No, Virginia, humans do not have the power to wipe all life from earth...if God has other plans (as we've already discussed).  Excerpts:

On 6 August 1945, the feast of the Transfiguration of Christ, an American bomber dropped an atomic bomb that detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, Japan. The blinding explosion killed everyone in a one-mile radius from “ground zero”—an estimated 80,000 men, women, and children.

On this date, a miracle occurred of which few have heard. The only survivors within that one mile radius were eight Jesuit priests. These eight men, like the eight that survived the Great Flood, walked away from the atomic blast and lived into old age without radiation poisoning...

The story reminds us Noah’s salvation in the ark, the deliverance of Daniel in the lion’s den, and, most of all, the preservation of Anania, Azaria, and Misael in the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar.

Nagasaki, the home of two-thirds of Japanese Catholics, suffered the second atomic bomb on 9 August 1945. This city which had become the “Japanese capital of Catholicism” was obliterated. However, the Franciscan Friary established by Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe in Nagasaki remained undamaged...

"...making sacred wounds blossom..."

So--glorious beauty abounding:

Without a conversation with Pierre, who had been imprisoned in the same camp as I-his name is different, but that does not matter-this book would not have been written. Pierre and I met on a Paris boulevard one day in the spring. There was a light rain, and trees were in bloom. Our discussion became a trifle heated, with the result that I had to give up, accept the challenge, and take to writing. Pierre had spent four years in the concentration camp of Dachau. He had come back bitter, aged, unrecognizable; his body sick, his soul still more sick. At each one of our meetings, it was the same story: "I no longer have any faith in man. What a filthy beast he is! What a selfish brute!" His memories obsessed him. He sipped the bitterness of their horror, scrutinizing one by one the long line of miseries. He would finish by hissing through his teeth the horrible words of Sartre: "Human fellowship is hell!" To a very direct question, he gave this answer: "Yes, I believe that God exists, in an inaccessible heaven of heavens, while we poor "human beings are crawling in mud. Grace? Why, yes, that exists perhaps, but of what importance is it if it does not succeed in changing man? There are certain miseries where grace has no access, where even God conceals His face. If you only knew!" "Tell me, Pierre," I said to him, "what do you make of the saints?" He began to laugh, a laugh that hurt. "Why, yes, I believe in saints. I believe that there are saints. But they are products of greenhouses. They need a special climate, a favorable one with sanctifying conditions. Saints do not grow in inhuman soil. I defy you to show me a saint in a concentration camp. One saint. One who truly prefers his neighbor to himself. I defy you!" For a moment I kept silent. Then, "Pierre, suppose I accept the challenge? If I show you a saint in a real concentration camp; someone who offered to die in place of a fellow prisoner ..." He looked at me with his pitiful beaten-dog eyes. We were standing in a doorway, while the rain fell hard and the brisk steps of infrequent passers-by alternated with the gusts of rain. "Then, and only then, will I admit that you are right." We changed the subject, but the blow had reached its mark. From this broken conversation the scheme of this book originated. It is not intended especially for religious persons, neither for the convents nor for the ladies of charitable societies. I destine and dedicate it to my brother the condemned one, to all those who have lost faith in man and, through that loss, no longer believe in God! Every man is an image of the living God, but only the saint appraises it, as a jeweler appraises a pearl. We have the terrible power to spit into the adorable Face, slap It, twist It into a caricature. The saint carries It as in a living monstrance. And a time can come when the invading Presence flashes like a flame on the bruised body, making sacred wounds blossom. Not every saint bears the stigmata; but there is no saint who does not die on the Cross. Love must be stronger than death. And sanctity is simply an adventure of love, the most thrilling adventure, and within reach of all. This is what Father Maximilian Kolbe, whose life I here relate, was incessantly preaching.

A Wondrous Advent Piece

By a Jesuit confined by the Nazis, shortly before he died:

There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up. Where life is firm we need to sense its firmness; and where it is unstable and uncertain and has no basis, no foundation, we need to know this too and endure it...Many of the things that are happening today would never have happened if we had been living in that movement and disquiet of heart which results when we are faced with God, the Lord, and when we look clearly at things as they really are. If we had done this, God would have withheld his hand from many things that have stirred up and shaken and crushed our lives. We would have seen the inner authorities, we would have seen and judged the limits of our own competence. But we have stood on this earth in false pathos, in false security; in our spiritual insanity we really believed we could, with the power of our own hand and arm, bring the stars down from heaven and kindle flames of eternity in the world. We believed that with our own forces we could avert the dangers and banish night, switch off and halt the internal quaking of the universe. We believed we could harness everything and fit it into a final order that would stand. Here is the message of Advent: faced with him who is the Last, the world will begin to shake...

Read the whole thing. Interesting side note: St. Maximilian Kolbe summarized his theology of Mary's relationship with the Holy Spirit in a quick note written just before the Nazis came and got him as well. The full sketch can be found in this book.

"A Crown of Twelve Stars"

I suspected there was a connection between the EU's flag and the crown of twelve stars encircling Our Lady's head in Revelation 12. Now I have evidence:

Arsène Heitz, the flag’s designer, acknowledged in a 2008 interview that he derived the design of a circle of 12 golden stars from the Book of Revelation. As Heitz was considering a design to submit for the EU, he was reading the history of the Blessed Virgin’s apparitions in Paris’ Rue du Bac, known today as the Virgin of the Miraculous Medal. In fact, he belonged to the Order of the Miraculous Medal, which would explain his intimate acquaintanceship with the symbol. Thus the symbol recognised worldwide as to the European Union and of Europe in general even by atheists, secularists and Muslims, is a symbol of the Immaculate Conception herself. It warms the cockles of an old Catholic’s heart.

European atheists running around in the streets waving the European Union flag over their heads have no idea, or choose to ignore, the true meaning behind the EU’s symbol. And, they are apparently stuck with it as the design isn’t going to change as long as the European Union exists. In celebration of the adoption of the symbol the Council of Europe commissioned and installed a magnificent stained-glass window in Strasbourg Cathedral which depicts the Blessed Virgin Mother standing beneath an oversized circle of 12 stars on deep blue field. In addition, the European flag was adopted by the then European Economic Community on December 8 1955, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Coincidence? I think not.

Great! Now we wait and pray eagerly for the day when they'll go the whole way and place her head on the flag in the midst of the stars--right where it should be.