Foundations

Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941) was a Polish Franciscan priest, a man of immense energy who founded a vast religious community and used modern printing and even radio to spread devotion to Mary. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland, his friary became a shelter for refugees, including thousands of Jews fleeing persecution. In 1941 he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, the most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps. There, in late July 1941, after a prisoner escaped, the guards chose ten men to be starved to death in retaliation. One of the chosen, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out in anguish for his wife and children. Father Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take the man's place. The guard agreed. In the starvation bunker Kolbe led the condemned in prayer and hymns, comforting them as they died one by one. After two weeks he was still alive, and on August 14, 1941, the eve of the feast of the Assumption of Mary, the guards killed him with an injection. Gajowniczek survived the war and lived to see his rescuer canonized in 1982; he attended the ceremony. St. John Paul II called Kolbe a 'martyr of charity.' His feast is August 14. He shows what the whole week asks us to see: in the very heart of the century's worst evil, a single man chose to lay down his life for a stranger, and so let the light of Christ shine in the darkest place on earth.

In the summer of 1914 the tinderbox of Europe caught fire. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand triggered the alliance system, and within weeks the great powers were at war. World War I (1914-1918) was a new kind of horror: industrial weapons, machine guns, artillery, poison gas, met old tactics, and millions of young men died for a few yards of mud in the stalemate of trench warfare. By the end, four empires had fallen and some seventeen million were dead. The peace that followed was harsh and unstable. In the wreckage rose totalitarian movements that claimed total control over their people: communism in the Soviet Union under Lenin and then Stalin, fascism in Italy under Mussolini, and Nazism in Germany under Adolf Hitler, who blamed Germany's woes on the Jews and preached a poisonous racial hatred. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, World War II began, the deadliest conflict in human history. It was fought across the globe, in Europe and North Africa and across the Pacific. At its black heart was the Holocaust, the deliberate, systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of others by the Nazi regime, an evil so vast it demands to be studied slowly and reverently, which we will do tomorrow. The war ended in 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany and, after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surrender of Japan, opening the fearful atomic age. Roughly sixty million people died. The century's machinery of progress had been turned into machinery of death.

After a lesson on the century's horrors, the Church's teaching is not abstract, it is the very judgment those horrors cry out for. YOUCAT 378-379 (with CCC 2258ff) teaches that human life is sacred from conception to natural death because each person is willed and loved by God; 'You shall not kill' guards this sacredness absolutely. The deliberate murder of the innocent is always and everywhere gravely evil. The Holocaust, the planned extermination of a whole people, is among the clearest examples in history of what the Church calls intrinsic evil: an act that no circumstance, order, or ideology can ever justify. After the war, the world agreed, naming such crimes 'crimes against humanity' and 'genocide.' On peace and war, YOUCAT 397 and the Catechism teach that peace is not merely the absence of fighting but 'the work of justice and the effect of charity' (CCC 2304); we are bound to do everything reasonably possible to avoid war, and even a justified defense must never target the innocent. This is why the faith honors both the soldier who defends the helpless and the martyr like Kolbe who lays down his life, while utterly condemning the regimes that murdered millions. The catechism gives the student a firm place to stand: not every act is equal, some things are simply, absolutely wrong, and the measure of all of it is the infinite dignity of each human person, made in the image of God.

Write one sentence answering: 'How can the same century hold both Auschwitz and St. Maximilian Kolbe?' Then copy the week's essential question onto a fresh page.