Ryan Duffy of St. Maximilian Kolbe really gave symposium-goers a strong sense of who his new school's patron was and why it is important to remember his story:
Imagine you are separated from all of your family and all of your friends. You are alone but you are surrounded by people. You are in Auschwitz and you are going to die. You slave for hours everyday and if you complain or fight back, you will die. Now, imagine that you see people being dragged to their deaths. You see them pleading with people to save them, to help them, to talk to them. You see a man being dragged away and he looks at you, you see the terror in his eyes and now you are moving. You go to this man who you have never seen before and you volunteer to take his place. You are one of the people who are now going to the starvation chambers but you go willingly, you chose to sacrifice your life for this strange man. Everything I have just described to you is an actual story about a man named Maximilian Kolbe. He was a priest, a martyr and a saint.
St. Maximilian Kolbe grew up in Poland. He was an average rebellious boy but one day he had a vision. He saw Mother Mary, she was holding two crowns - a white crown and a red crown. White symbolized purity and red was for martyrdom. She told him to choose one. He decided to take both. That was when he became a very religious person. Later in his life, he showed a great brilliance toward many aspects of his studies. He had originally decided to be a teacher, but instead he was called to the priesthood. He was ordained in 1918. His mission in priesthood was to be a spiritual soldier. By 1927, he had establish the city name Niepokalanow, the City of the Immaculate. It was to be a self-sustaining village centred on faith in God and devotion to Mary. It originally had 18 priests there but by 1938, there were 650 priests, making it the largest Catholic religious house in the world.
St. Max spent the last part of his life in a concentration camp, Auschwitz. He worked all day and he slept in a bunk made of wood with four other people. Everyday he would only be fed enough to keep him working. One day, another person that St. Max spent time with was chosen to go to the starvation chambers to die. St. Max volunteered to take the man's place because the man had a wife and kids. The S.S. guards did not object and the man escaped death. While St. Max spent many torturous days without food, he still continued to resist. While St. Max was in the chamber, he sang with all the other people condemned to die there. They sang and fought the Nazis by not allowing their spirits to be broken. Not only did St. Maximilian keep those people's spirits alive, he also gave them a sense of hope. After two weeks, St. Max amazingly survived his sentence in the starvation chamber and it had still not broken his spirit. The S.S. guards and the commandant took him into a cell and injected him with a lethal dose of carbolic acid.
St. Max was a great man but why would we go and spent time to learn about him? Our group wanted to learn about one of the inspiring cases where one person defies evil for the greater good. St. Max defied the Nazis by giving hope to hundreds of people through his actions. Today, St. Maximilian's work continues throughout the world through the members of the Militia of the Immaculata. His work continues to bring Catholics together. His greatest lesson is that we should put others before ourselves, and in his own words: "never forget love".
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