Poland's Maximilian Kolbe is declared a Catholic saint
"Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Repeating those words of Jesus (John 15:13), Pope John Paul II last week presided over the canonization of a fellow Pole who greatly inspired his own vocation as a priest: Maximilian Maria Kolbe, a Franciscan friar who died for his faith—and to save another man's life—at the most notorious of Nazi death camps.
At the end of July 1941, a commandant at Auschwitz arbitrarily selected ten men to be starved to death in reprisal for the escape of one inmate. Francizek Gajowniczek, one of the ten, cried out for his wife and two children. Father Kolbe, 47, a political prisoner, offered to take Gajowniczek's place. Consigned to a basement cell, Kolbe survived about two weeks without food or water, consoling his fellow victims with prayers, until a prison guard finally killed him with an injection.
The canonization ceremony for Kolbe in St. Peter's Square was attended by 150,000 worshipers, among them 5,000 Catholics who came from Poland legally and hundreds of others who surreptitiously slipped out of that troubled country. After the rite, John Paul stepped down from the altar platform to kiss and embrace Gajowniczek, now 81, who had wept silently through the service. Gajowniczek recalls: "I was never able to thank him personally, but we looked into each other's eyes before he was led away."
Although 50 Polish bishops were at St. Peter's, the country's Primate, Archbishop Jozef Glemp of Warsaw, stayed at home because of his fear of civil unrest. He celebrated an outdoor Mass at Niepokalanow (City of the Immaculate), a friary founded by Kolbe 25 miles west of Warsaw. John Paul, in a noontime address following the canonization, denounced the dissolution of the independent union Solidarity as "a violation of the fundamental rights of man and society." (Poland's state radio and television censored this criticism in its coverage of the ceremonies.) Next day, facing an audience that included a stone-faced government delegation from Poland, the Pope pleaded for the release of his homeland's political prisoners.
The day before the canonization, terrorists, armed with hand grenades and submachine guns, killed a two-year-old boy and wounded 38 other Jews leaving festival services in Rome's largest synagogue. In his sermon honoring Kolbe, the Pope said, "The tragic fate of so many Jews destroyed without pity in the concentration camps has already been condemned, firmly and irrevocably, by the conscience of humanity. But unfortunately, even in our own time criminal episodes of anti-Semitic hatred are repeated." He then denounced the "execrable attack" of the preceding day. Jewish leaders nonetheless complained bitterly that the Pope's September meeting with Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had helped create a climate for the incident.