Maximilian Kolbe
Sermon for St Bartholomew’s Day preached by Kenneth Padley
Sunday 24th August 2025
Very little is known of Bartholomew, the saint whom we commemorate today. If anything, he is best remembered for being flayed alive on the shores of the Caspian Sea and so is often depicted carrying his own skin.
This legend of Bartholomew’s gruesome martyrdom is a shocking example of how saints stand out from the crowd. After all, that is what ‘saint’ means. God’s holy ones are those set apart from the normal workings of the world.
However, because we know so little about Bartholomew’s life and witness, I would like to major tonight on a more recent example of Christian witness, one whose radically different life and death stands firmly in the tradition of Bartholomew and earlier heroes of the faith. He too is an August saint, the 84th anniversary of his martyrdom having passed a few days ago.
Maximilian Kolbe was born in Poland in 1894. His mother reported only after his death that, when Maximilian was seven, her son had received a vision of Mary in which he was offered a white crown for purity and a red crown for martyrdom. The small boy told his mother that he had accepted both.
Maximilian trained as a Franciscan friar and priest. He overcame severely damaged lungs to undertake educational and publicity work for the Church, producing Christian literature in Poland and Japan in the 1920s and 30s. Maximilian’s magazine, the Knight of the Immaculate, became a tool for proclaiming Christian truth in an age of cataclysmic ideological conflict across Europe.
With time, these ideologies tipped over into violence, first locally and then nationally. Maximilian was back in Poland when in 1939 tanks rolled in from east and west, crushing the country like a nut in the press. Maximilian viewed the Second World War as an outward expression of the search for truth in every human heart. He wrote in the final editorial of his magazine:
No one in the world can change Truth. What we can and should do is seek Truth and serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is within. Beyond the armies of occupation and the holocausts of the extermination camps, two irreconcilable enemies lie in the depths of every soul. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are defeated in our innermost selves?
In early 1941 Maximilian was arrested and taken to the Pawiak prison in centre of Warsaw. Among the insults and offences he endured, an SS officer thrust the crucifix around his neck back in his face and asked ‘Do you believe in that?’ Answer: ‘I do’, which answer earned Maximilian a vicious blow to the face. ‘Do you believe in that?’ he was asked again. His answer earned him a battering.
One of his fellow prisoners in Warsaw noted that Maximilian remained calm and self-controlled throughout. ‘He behaved’ said Edward Gniadek ‘as though nothing untoward had happened’. In becoming different from the world, Maximilian had of course become like Christ. How very like the passive Jesus at his trial was the Polish monk in that prison, turning the other cheek to the hatred of his captors.
In May 1941 Kolbe was taken from Warsaw to Auschwitz. As the trucks rolled off, his voice led the singing of prayer and praise. In Auschwitz, a place that stripped people of hope and identity, prisoner number 16670 still remained different, still remained Christ-like. Knowing he would never escape he said, ‘every man has an aim in life. For most it is to return home to their families. But my desire is to give my life for the good of all.’
After gross over-work and a brutal whipping, Kolbe was taken to the makeshift camp hospital. Even here his concern was to rest near the hospital door so he might pray for those coming in and out.
It was late July or early August 1941 when three men escaped the camp, including one from Kolbe’s own block. The punishment was well known: ten would die in retribution for the one who had fled. The prisoners were made to stand from dawn to dusk in the heat of the day until the Deputy Commandant came and hand-picked the victims. The ninth man, Franc Gajowniczek, aware that his wife and family would never see him again, begged for mercy. Then the unheard of happened – the greatest act of difference in such an utterly different life. A small bespectacled man stepped out of the ranks and walked to where the party of soldiers was standing. Prisoner 16670 offered his life in Franc’s place. Restricted from all freedom, Maximilian still had the choice to wage the inner battle and make the ultimate sacrifice. So astounded was the Deputy Commandant at this gesture, he didn’t just shoot them both on the spot but accepted the exchange.
Along with 9 others, Kolbe was incarcerated naked in a starvation block. He survived fourteen days without food or water, leading the others in prayer and hymns until, impatient for the chamber, the camp authorities finally ordered the remaining victims to be killed by lethal injection.
Kolbe’s body was taken to the ovens and his ashes scattered to the wind. When a later bishop of Kracow, one Karol Wojtyla, was asked to send a relic of Kolbe to the Vatican he could only respond that ‘I have nothing to give… nothing but a grain of Auschwitz soil’. Later still, in 1982, that same bishop, now Pope John Paul II, formally canonised his fellow Pole. Among the congregation at that great celebration was Franc Gajowniczek the man whom Kolbe died to save, living proof that the saint in death had made a difference in life.
Roll forward the clock a further 16 years to 1998 and a statue of Kolbe was among ten Modern Martyrs unveiled on the west front of Westminster Abbey. Each of these figures bears witness to distinctive Christian holiness in the twentieth century. Maximilian is a most worthy candidate for such placement on the Abbey, yet more worthy – like Bartholomew – as a living stone compacted in the heights of heaven above. Words cannot express the achievement through grace that God can work through human lives. Kolbe’s example remains ours to emulate. Not for us – Deo Volente – the torture of Auschwitz nor the injustices still suffered by those persecuted for their faith. Nonetheless, each and every one of us remains confronted by that daily inner struggle between good and evil to which Kolbe reduced the momentous events of his age – and ours. Amen.