Obedience to the Will of God
“I am a Polish Catholic priest. I would like to take the place of this man, since he has a wife and children.”
(Saint Maximilian Kolbe, OFM Con., taking the place of fellow prisoner Franciszek Gajowniczek at Auschwitz.)
On today’s Vigil of the Assumption, we celebrate also the memory of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan Friar and priest who spent much of his life as a missionary.
He returned to his native Poland, where he helped lead a publishing house that produced religious tracts and anti-Nazi literature. The friary itself provided shelter to refugees, including some 2,000 Jews they hid from German persecution.
He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and eventually sent to Auschwitz as prisoner 16670.
Following the escape of ten prisoners, the camp commandant ordered that ten prisoners be picked at random and locked in a cell until they starved to death.
Father Maximilian volunteered to go in the place of one of the men.
In the cell, he led the prisoners in prayer. Each time the SS guards looked in, he was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell, smiling cheerfully at them. After two weeks, only Kolbe remained alive.
In their impatience, the guards killed him on August 14, 1941, with a lethal injection of carbolic acid. An eyewitness records that Father Maximilian calmly raised up his arm to receive the injection.
Because God’s glory shines through most brightly in the salvation of the souls that Christ redeemed with his own blood, let it be the chief concern of the apostolic life to bring salvation and an increase in holiness to as many souls as possible.
Let me briefly outline the best way to achieve this end – both for the glory of God and for the sanctification of the greatest number. God, who is infinite knowledge and infinite wisdom, knows perfectly what is to be done to give him glory, and in the clearest way possible makes his will known to us through his vice-gerents on Earth.
It is obedience and obedience alone that shows us God’s will with certainty. Of course our superiors may err, but it cannot happen that we, holding fast to our obedience, should be led into error by this. There is only one exception: if the superior commands something that would obviously involve breaking God’s law, however slightly. In that case the superior could not be acting as a faithful interpreter of God’s will.
God himself is the one infinite, wise, holy, and merciful Lord, our Creator and our Father, the beginning and the end, wisdom, power, and love – God is all these. Anything that is apart from God has value only in so far as it is brought back to him, the Founder of all things, the Redeemer of mankind, the final end of all creation.
Thus he himself makes his holy will known to us through his vice-gerents on Earth and draws us to himself, and through us – for so he has willed – draws other souls too, and unites them to himself with an ever more perfect love.
See then, brother, the tremendous honour of the position that God in his kindness has placed us in. Through obedience we transcend our own limitations and align ourselves with God’s will, which, with infinite wisdom and prudence, guides us to do what is best. Moreover, as we become filled with the divine will, which no created thing can resist, so we become stronger than all others.
(Excerpt of a letter of Saint Maximilian Kolbe,
from today’s Office of Readings)
