Fr Paul Gooley reads from the Gospel of Matthew (18: 15-20) in which Jesus instructs the disciples on how to resolve conflict and reminds them that “where two or three meet in my name, there am I with them.” Afterwards, Fr Paul shares a little about the life of St Maximilian Kolbe whose memorial we celebrate today.

Fr Paul says, Maximilian was born on 8 January 1894 in occupied Poland: he joined the Franciscans in 1910, and was ordained eight years later, as his country became free and independent for the first time in over 120 years.

Maximilian believed that the world was passing through a time of intense spiritual crisis, and that Christians must fight for the world’s salvation with all the means of modern communication. He founded a newspaper, and a sodality called the Knights of Mary Immaculate, which spread widely both in Poland and abroad.

In 1927 he founded a community, a “city of Mary,” at Teresin centred round the Franciscan friary; it attracted many lay people; and became self-supporting, publishing many periodicals and running its own radio station.

In 1930 he went to Japan, studied Buddhism and Shintoism, and through the Japanese edition of his newspaper spread the Christian message in a way that was in harmony with Japanese culture. In Nagasaki, he set up a “Garden of the Immaculate,” which survived the atomic bomb.

He also travelled to Malabar and to Moscow but was recalled to Poland in 1936 for reasons of health.

When the Germans invaded in 1939, the community at Teresin sheltered thousands of refugees, most of them Jews.

In 1941 he was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, where he helped the inmates. In August of that year a prisoner escaped, and in reprisal the authorities were choosing ten people to die by starvation. One of the men had a family, and Maximilian Kolbe offered to take his place. The offer was accepted, and he spent his last days comforting his fellow prisoners.

The man he saved that day was present at his canonization.

Today, Fr Paul invites us to ask, ‘St Maximilian Kolbe… Pray for us!’.