Pope declares St. Maximilian Kolbe a martyr before the prisoner he saved

VATICAN CITY, October 10, 1982 AD — Pope St. John Paul II canonized Saint Maximilian Kolbe in St. Peter’s Square today. By his apostolic authority, the Pope also decreed that the Polish friar who died at Auschwitz in 1941 AD is to be venerated as a Martyr. Since his beatification, St. Maximilian had been honoured as a Confessor. Franciszek Gajowniczek, the prisoner whose place St. Maximilian took, was in the crowd.

St. Maximilian was a Franciscan priest, sent to Auschwitz as a prisoner in May 1941 AD. At the end of July 1941 AD a prisoner from his block was missing at roll call, and a search of several days failed to find him. The camp’s rule was that when a prisoner escaped, ten men from his block were chosen at random to die of starvation. Ten men were picked and condemned to the starvation bunker of Block 11. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out that he had a wife and children. St. Maximilian stepped out of the ranks and asked the deputy commandant running the selection, Karl Fritzsch, to take him instead. When Fritzsch asked who he was, St. Maximilian answered: “I am a Catholic priest.” St. Maximilian said Gajowniczek was the father of a family, and that the people who depended on him needed him alive. Fritzsch agreed to the exchange. After more than two weeks without food, St. Maximilian was killed with a lethal injection on August 14, 1941 AD.

Pope St. Paul VI beatified him on October 17, 1971 AD as a Confessor, the title the Church gives a saint honoured for heroic virtue. A martyr is something else: by the Church’s traditional test, someone killed in hatred of the faith. St. Maximilian had stepped forward to die in another man’s place, and senior churchmen argued over whether that death met the test. The bishops of Poland and of Germany asked that he be proclaimed a martyr. Two judges specially appointed to examine the question had ruled against it. Today the Pope overruled them.

The German bishops had stood beside the Polish bishops on St. Maximilian’s cause for almost twenty years. During the second session of the Second Vatican Council, in late 1963 AD, the two bishops’ conferences jointly asked for his beatification. At the beatification Mass in 1971 AD, German citizens handed out leaflets saying that honouring the Polish martyr was a wrong done to the German nation. Pope St. Paul VI called St. Maximilian a martyr of love that day and named the man he had saved: St. Maximilian, the Pope said, “was willing to give up his life for that of a fellow countryman, Francis Gajowniczeck.” Gajowniczek was at that Mass too.

Polish pilgrims came to the square today in large numbers, less than a year after martial law was imposed in Poland. The communist government let former camp prisoners and Caritas workers travel first, tried to stop pilgrims bringing Solidarity banners and emblems to Rome, and sent a delegation of its own. Archbishop Józef Glemp, the head of the Church in Poland, could not come to Rome. He stayed in Warsaw because of his duties to the Church at home.

Pope St. John Paul II opened his homily with the words of Christ in St. John’s Gospel: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” He went on: “From today on, the Church desires to address as ‘Saint’ a man who was granted the grace of carrying out these words of the Redeemer in an absolutely literal manner.” He told the story of the selection in a few sentences, and then made the case for the martyr’s title.

The Pope said the men in the camp who saw what happened did not count it simply as a death: “Maximilian did not die but ‘gave his life… for his brother.’” He called that death a victory “over all systematic contempt and hate for man and for what is divine in man.”

After the beatification, the Pope said, the Church had to take into account “many voices of the People of God — especially of our Brothers in the episcopate of both Poland and Germany — who asked that Maximilian Kolbe be proclaimed as a martyr saint.” Then the Pope asked: “Does not this death make Maximilian particularly like unto Christ — the Model of all Martyrs — who gives his own life on the Cross for his brethren?”

Pope St. John Paul II then gave the decree: “And so, in virtue of my apostolic authority, I have decreed that Maximilian Maria Kolbe — who after his Beatification was venerated as a Confessor — shall henceforeward be venerated also as a Martyr!” He closed with the response of the day’s psalm: “Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones!”

Gajowniczek was in the square to hear it. He had never heard of St. Maximilian before the camp and never spoke with him there; he learned only later who had died in his place. He was moved from Auschwitz to Sachsenhausen and was freed there. His two sons, Bogdan and Janusz, had been killed by artillery fire at Rawa Mazowiecka in January 1945 AD. When he came home, he found only his wife.