In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
In this past year and a half or so, there's been this string of uncanny coincidences that
our MIM meeting almost always seems to fall on some Franciscan feast, or if not, then on some
Marian feast. And today, we find that that pattern is not broken. At some point, I'm sure it will be,
but today we have the joy of having our meeting on the feast, on the solemnity of Saint Maximilian
Mary Colby. I hope that he doesn't need an introduction in this group here. He's a saint
He's the reason why we're all gathered here together today, because each one of us has heard
a particular calling, shall we say, of God speaking to our hearts, inspiring us to listen
to the sublime doctrine of this great apostle of devotion to Our Lady, inspiring us to follow
his example of imitating Christ in life and in death, even to the point of giving ourselves
very deeply touched our lives, precisely because his life was so deeply touched by our Lord and by
our Blessed Mother. There are countless things we could say about Saint Maximilian, and I think
we'll just touch on a couple of things here, and then we'll talk about him further in the
conference later on. A couple points is that if you read the account of Saint Maximilian's
martyrdom, you know, we've all heard the story, I'm sure. In fact, some of us were here last
night for the transitus, that rite where we remember his glorious passage into eternal life.
Saint Maximilian had a kind of, he's dubbed a martyr of charity, because this was a very unusual
martyrdom. It wasn't the typical kind of martyrdom where, you know, you have somebody come up to you
with a sword or a gun, you know, telling you to renounce your faith.
And where you have to make a split-second decision whether you're going to be faithful
to the gospel or not. No, Saint Maximilian's martyrdom was of a very different kind,
because he was actually the one who first stepped forward. He was the one who came out of the safety
and the security and stepped forward and said, I want to offer my life. I want to die, right?
It's, we all know the story. He was in the concentration camp of Auschwitz in 1941.
One of the prisoners had escaped, and as was the custom among the SS officers that ran the camp,
in order to dissuade people from imitating the example, every time somebody escaped from the
camp, they would round up 10 prisoners and they would put them in the starvation bunker, right?
And the starvation bunker was designed in order to be a little antechamber of hell. In fact,
all the torments of the starvation bunker were geared toward getting the people to die in a
state of despair.
Very horrible when you think about it, right? Everything is geared toward making them die in a
state of sin, blaspheming God. And that's tragically what too often happened. The people
would go in there and then for however many days or weeks they survived, they would be given no
food, no water, and they would basically, they would wither away. As one of the guards put it,
you'll wither away like tulips. Okay. It's the heights or the depths, you might say, of man's
inhumanity to man.
And it was such a dreadful thing that you can imagine, you know, the prisoners as they were
standing there in line waiting to find out who would be selected, who would be the 10 unfortunate
souls to go into the starvation bunker. You could imagine them all cringing there, praying to God
saying, please, Lord, not me, not me. Let it be the other guy, the guy standing next to me.
But that wasn't the prayer of St. Maximilian, was it? He did the complete opposite. He actually
stepped out of line. He stepped out forward.
And he said, please let it be me. How very different is that prayer? Not just from the
prayer of those others in the camp, but even from our own so often, right? So often our prayer is
geared toward escaping from suffering, asking, Lord, oh, please take this trial away from me.
Please take this cross away from me. Please let me suffer less. Okay. That's not what St. Maximilian
prayed. He wanted to be the one chosen. And when he wasn't the one chosen, what did he do? He
stepped out of line and he volunteered. He volunteered to take the,
the place of a, of a man, a husband and father, uh, who had been selected. And, uh, when he was
selected, uh, broke down weeping, crying, saying, no, my wife, my children. St. Maximilian had never
even spoken to this man. He presumably didn't know the guy, the man's name. Uh, there wasn't
any personal relationship between them. And yet St. Maximilian offered his life for this stranger.
Okay. And, uh, at first it completely threw the, the, the guards in the camp. They didn't know,
didn't know what to make of it. It was unheard of for someone to actually volunteer to go into
the starvation bunker. And yet that's exactly what St. Maximilian did. Um, he came forward and he,
they said, what do you want? And it's amazing that he made it even that far, because ordinarily,
if someone stepped out of line, they would have just been shot on the spot. They would have been
killed. Uh, some would have assumed that they were going to come forward and try to kill the SS
officers or they were going berserk. But he actually, he came forward and, and they asked
him, what did you want? And he said, I want to take the place of that man. And he said, I want to
take the place of that man. Which one? The, the husband and father, uh, who was crying. And they,
they looked at him incredulously and they said, who are you? Right. And do you remember the
response? He said, I am a Catholic priest. Okay. This is a witness, which we so desperately need
because it tells us the nature of the Catholic priesthood, right? You know, um, every Catholic
priest is called to lay down his life in imitation of Christ in union with Christ who laid down his
life so that we might live. Okay. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and,
and St. Maximilian, the martyr of charity lived out his priestly vocation to the full by laying
down his life voluntarily, freely, so that others might live. Okay. Remember the words of our
blessed Lord in the gospel. Nobody takes my life from late and from me. I lay it down of my own
accord. Okay. This wasn't an act of murder. It was a martyrdom by a man who freely offered himself
to death. And when the, when the SS guard heard that this was a Catholic priest,
he immediately accepted. Why? Because the, uh, the SS guards had a particular hatred for Catholic
priests. Okay. And St. Maximilian offered his life in this sublime testimony of love for the sake of
his fellow prisoner, Francis Gajniczik. Um, the man who was spared, Francis Gajniczik,
miraculously, he wound up surviving to the end of war. He was liberated. He got out of the camp
and he, he died only a few years ago. Uh, in fact, he even visited our friary in New Bedford,
Massachusetts back in the nineties. And, uh, um, I wasn't there at the time. This was a little
before I entered the order. And, but apparently he had a, it was a beautiful visit. And he
commented that the friars there reminded him of the, of St. Maximilian's friars who, uh, whom he
had met at Nebuchadnezzar. At any rate, uh, you can imagine how this man's life was, was, was
changed, was transformed, you know, by the knowledge that, that someone had actually
sacrificed his life so he could live, right? This man lived another, another 50 years or so,
uh,
thanks to whom? Thanks to St. Maximilian, Mary Colby. And of course, this wasn't the only man
whose life was touched by St. Maximilian's glorious martyrdom, right? Uh, all the other
people that were there in the starvation bunker were touched very, very deeply because that place
of, of despair, of darkness, where you usually could hear subhuman howling, people that were
going mad because they were, they were dying of thirst. Uh, it was turned into a little chapel.
You know, the, the witnesses that were in the, there in the camp said you could hear the,
the recitation of the Hail Mary.
The rosary inside of the, inside of the bunker. They said you could hear the, uh, you could hear
them, hear them singing hymns in honor of Our Lady. This place of despair, this, this antechamber
of hell was instead turned into a little chapel, into an antechamber of heaven. And instead of the
people dying, cursing God and descending into the depths, they died blessing God, blessing our
blessed mother. And consequently they rose up together, uh, with her into heaven. And it's
very poignant that, uh, that the date of St.
Maximilian's own death was, uh, was the visual of the assumption of Our Lady, right? He had said
years before that he wished to be, to be incinerated. He wished to be reduced to dust
for love of God, for love of Our Lady. And that's exactly what happened, right? After his death,
he was, uh, he was, uh, his body was put in a wooden casket and brought to the crematorium.
Okay. And, uh, and, uh, when the, when the word got back to the SS guard, uh, the, to the commandant
who was the head of the camp, uh, he said, well, at least there's one martyr.
A martyr without relics. Okay. Actually, coincidentally, he's not completely without
relics. You've, you might've, you might know the story of how sometime before that, uh, before St.
Maximilian was arrested, one, uh, while they were doing the haircuts in the friary, one of the
friars had an inspiration. He was the one doing the haircuts and he, he gathered up the hair
clippings from St. Maximilian because everybody recognized that this man was a saint and he,
he gathered them together and St. Maximilian perhaps figured out what the man was up to.
So he said to him, uh, why don't you take those hair clippings and put them in the furnace?
And, uh, and the friary very obediently took the hair clippings and put them in the furnace.
Um, and then St. Maximilian left. However, the furnace wasn't lit.
And St. Maximilian never said anything about leaving them in there and he didn't say he had
to burn them. So the guy went back later and got the hair clippings. And those are the few
first class relics we have today of St. Maximilian. Okay. Um, a very glorious martyr. And by the way,
another point, which most of you know already is that, uh,
uh, St. Maximilian was in there for, I think it was close to two weeks and he still hadn't died,
you know, which is, which is a miracle when you consider how frail his health was before he was
even taken to the camp. Um, St. Maximilian had tuberculosis and, uh, one of his lungs had
completely shut down already. And the other one was basically operating at, at, uh, at half power.
Uh, and it was a miracle that he was even alive at the time that he was arrested. Okay. And when
they, when they brought him to the camp, you know, he didn't,
He wasn't doing much better.
In fact, the SS officers made him carry heavy burdens of wood
on his shoulders day in and day out.
Think of what a privilege that was, too,
to spend the last days of your life carrying wood on your shoulders.
What does that make you think of?
For St. Maximilian, it must have been a joy
because he knew that it united him to our blessed Lord.
And when he was put in the...
And throughout his time in the...
Cell phone's off, please.
Okay. Throughout his time in the camp,
he always took only a very small part of his own ration,
which was meager to begin with,
and he gave the rest to the other prisoners who were hungry.
It's a miracle that this man was alive.
Okay. And then they throw him into the starvation bunker
and he's...
And they're getting no food, no water,
and all the other prisoners are dying one by one.
And finally, only St. Maximilian
and I think three others are left alive.
Okay.
And they had to come and give him an injection of carbolic acid
in order to finish him off.
One reason we know for this is, as I told you before,
that promise that our Lord made to St. Francis, right?
That no Franciscan would ever die of starvation.
Okay.
You put a Franciscan in a starvation bunker
and see what happens.
Okay.
I'm not inviting you to put our friars in a starvation bunker,
but okay.
Okay.
Okay.
There's some things that you don't want to test for yourself.
Okay.
Kids, don't try this at home, as they say.
But...
At any rate,
St. Maximilian is indeed a witness for us today.
Pope John Paul II declared him the patron of our difficult century,
meaning the 20th century.
But I think that that patronage could extend
even to our own 21st century now
because what we're seeing now
is we're reaping the fruits of all the horrors,
all the evil that began in the 20th century.
And we very much need the witness of St. Maximilian today.
We need...
that witness of a total self-donation to God
and to our Blessed Mother.
In the little biography of St. Maximilian
that's in our book,
Colby, Saint of the Immaculata,
there's a beautiful line which says that
in the clash between St. Maximilian and Colby
and the SS guard that condemned him to death
that accepted his offering,
it was a clash between the man who had rejected God
and the man who had dared to love God totally.
Okay, that's really the clash that we're living through today.
We have a civilization today which has rejected God, right?
A civilization, if you can call it that anymore,
which insists on man's complete independence,
man's complete autonomy,
as if we didn't need God anymore.
And that clashes with what?
It clashes with St. Maximilian's witness
of not just not rejecting God,
but of loving him totally,
acknowledging his kingship,
over our mind, over our heart,
giving him everything that we have,
everything we do, everything we are,
through the hands of our Blessed Mother.
That's what we so desperately need today.
And so let's pray to St. Maximilian
that he will give us the grace to be a Holy Leaven,
to be witnesses, to be apostles
to this hedonistic and atheistic civilization
so that we can transform it into a civilization of love.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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