The man he died for stood in the crowd

VATICAN CITY, October 10, 1982 AD — On October 10, 1982 AD, Pope St. John Paul II canonized Saint Maximilian Kolbe in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. That means the Church would now call him Saint. The Pope also declared him a martyr, a title he had not carried before.

Franciszek Gajowniczek was standing in the crowd. He was alive because St. Maximilian had taken his place at Auschwitz in 1941 AD.

St. Maximilian was a Franciscan priest. In May 1941 AD he was sent to the camp at Auschwitz as a prisoner. At the end of July, a prisoner from his block was missing when the prisoners were counted. A search of several days didn’t find him.

The camp had a rule for an escape. Ten men from the missing man’s block were chosen at random to die of starvation. Ten men were picked and sent to the starvation bunker of Block 11. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out that he had a wife and children.

“I am a Catholic priest”

St. Maximilian stepped out of the line. He asked the deputy commandant running the selection, Karl Fritzsch, to take him instead. Fritzsch asked who he was. St. Maximilian answered: “I am a Catholic priest.” He said Gajowniczek was the father of a family. The people who depended on Gajowniczek needed him alive, St. Maximilian said. Fritzsch agreed to the swap.

St. Maximilian went without food for more than two weeks in the bunker. On August 14, 1941 AD he was killed with a lethal injection.

Gajowniczek lived. He was moved from Auschwitz to Sachsenhausen, and he was freed there. His two sons, Bogdan and Janusz, had been killed by shellfire in January 1945 AD. When he came home, he found only his wife. He learned only later who had died in his place.

Saint, or martyr?

In 1971 AD, Pope St. Paul VI declared St. Maximilian blessed, as a Confessor. That’s the title the Church gives a saint honoured for heroic virtue. A martyr is different: by the Church’s traditional test, a martyr is someone killed in hatred of the faith. St. Maximilian had died because he stepped forward in another man’s place. Senior churchmen argued over whether a death like that made him a martyr.

The bishops of Poland and of Germany asked for him to be named a martyr. The German bishops had stood beside the Polish bishops on St. Maximilian’s cause for almost twenty years. Two judges chosen specially to look at the question had ruled against it.

In St. Peter’s Square, Pope St. John Paul II began his sermon with the words of Jesus in St. John’s Gospel: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Then the Pope 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.”

Next the Pope ruled against the two judges. He 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!”

Gajowniczek was in the square to hear it. He had never heard of St. Maximilian before the camp, and he never spoke with him there.