Searching India for land, St. Maximilian Kolbe writes out the journey's perils

ERNAKULAM, India, this month, 1932 AD — This month Saint Maximilian Kolbe wrote out by hand a letter to the Immaculata — the Blessed Virgin Mary, conceived without sin, whose name he puts on everything he builds. In it he set down the perils of the journey he has made this year through China and India, and told her that they were all for her sake. He wrote it on the feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary. He is thirty-eight, a Conventual Franciscan of the Polish province, and he has spent the year looking for ground.

What he wants is a site for a third City of the Immaculata — a friary built around a printing house, of the kind he has already raised twice from nothing. On the Malabar coast of India, Catholics of the Latin rite and of the Syrian rite live under two archbishops with separate jurisdictions, so ground granted by one is no use to friars of the other rite without the Latin Archbishop’s consent.

Five years ago he was clearing a field at Teresin, west of Warsaw, on land given him by Prince Jan Drucki-Lubecki. On December 8, 1927 AD the friary there was consecrated and named Niepokalanów (the City of the Immaculata). The monthly he had begun at Kraków, in a print run of five thousand, came with them at sixty-five thousand copies a month; its presses arrived from Grodno in four railway wagons. By the time he left for Japan at the start of 1930 AD, Niepokalanów had two houses of formation, a fire brigade of its own and a little over a hundred friars. At Nagasaki he built the second city from nothing.

Permission for a third city came this year, once the Japanese community was large enough and a newly arrived missionary priest could stand in for him. His Provincial, Fr Cornelius Czupryk, had written that India suited them better than China. On the train out of Nagasaki he wrote to Niepokalanów and to the readers of the Knight: “There you have to head out all over again into the unknown, facing uncertainty, unforeseen crosses… And perhaps we will have to come back empty-handed? Or maybe it will be necessary to lay down our lives extenuated by hardships…? But in the end, all this is for the Immaculate.”

Three weeks of travel by sea and land brought him to the Malabar coast. A young Syrian-rite priest he met on the train took him to Archbishop Augustine Kandathil at Ernakulam, who gave him a bed and the run of the house. He gave out at first that he was the editor of the Knight, in India to gather material. Then he asked Archbishop Kandathil whether a friary like Niepokalanów would suit the district. The answer was no: there were priests here already, and they were doing the work.

The next day he went to the Latin Archbishop, Angelo Maria Perez y Cecilia. He was a Spaniard and a Discalced Carmelite, and less likely to consent than St. Maximilian Kolbe had hoped. At dinner the following evening one of the younger priests said outright that the visitor had come to found a house. St. Maximilian Kolbe gave the young priest one sentence: “Where and when is the Immaculate’s business.” Archbishop Perez y Cecilia heard it and said nothing. St. Maximilian Kolbe did not dare put the question to him, in case a refusal killed the chance of an official approach from Poland.

By then he had lost hope, and he had prayed the Rosary far more than usual that week. Waiting in a dark corridor at the Archbishop’s house, he prayed in front of a statue of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus with flowers at its feet. Years before he had promised to pray for her canonisation at every Mass, and she was to look after his mission in return. He recorded what he said to her: “I started to pray, and even to complain a little to St. Therese, and concluded my prayers with these words: ‘let’s see if you remember.’” A flower fell from the statue onto the table below.

Two days later the difficulties were gone. He had been promised the use of land, a building he could start work in at once, and a fairly large chapel. St. Maximilian Kolbe asked the Archbishop whether friars who came now would have to leave again, as three Carmelites had before them. “Come, come,” the Archbishop answered. St. Maximilian Kolbe then asked where ground could be had in use rather than in property. The Archbishop named a property at once and drove him out to see it: a garden of about two hundred acres, with a chapel and a house good enough to begin in.

What he wants a City of the Immaculata to have, wherever it goes up, is road, rail and air links, a cinema, a radio transmitter and a university. He reckons a small Indian Knight can be started for ten American dollars a month, three thousand copies to begin with, and grow on whatever is given. He asked his Provincial whether the friars might be in place by the feast of the Immaculate Conception, with the first number out in January, since other orders are circling the district.

Archbishop Perez y Cecilia is waiting for a letter from the Polish province to lay before his consultors.