“God had snuck into hell”
On the feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe
In 2017, I came across a long essay by Jessica Keating titled, St. Maximilian Kolbe and the War Against Indifference.
I’ve heard people say that you don’t pick patron saints, they pick you. This was, and is, my experience with Maximilian Kolbe. This essay was the best thing I’d ever read about Maximilian Kolbe’s life and I’ve read it on his feast day ever since.
In her essay, Jessica Keating connects Kolbe’s life and witness with the Church doctrine of theosis. In it’s simplest terms, this is the teaching that, as St. Athanasius stated, “The Son of God became man so that we might become God."
Salvation, from a Catholic perspective, isn’t only forgiveness of sin, it’s sharing in God’s divine life. It’s being divinized, Christified, in heaven and during this life. And that’s the story of Maximilian Kolbe. Jessica Keating wrote:
"Kolbe would die as he had lived—an icon of the royal priesthood of Christ. Entering the ranks of the nameless condemned, he became one of more than 1.1 million men, women, and children to die within these walls of hatred.
He did not know the man he had volunteered to replace, but he was so practiced in love that it made little difference. They were stripped naked and cast into the starvation cell. As one biographer puts it, “God had snuck into hell.” Kolbe’s will had so completely merged with God’s that it was truly no longer he who lived, but Christ in him."
“God had snuck into hell.”
In this sense, we can say that Kolbe’s arrest and time in Auschwitz was a kind of Holy Saturday, of Christ breaking into hell to bring light and life to the darkest place.
Two years ago (on my old podcast, Pope Francis Generation) I had the joy of talking with Jessica Keating about her essay.
This episode is available on Youtube or in your favorite podcast app!
If you have a minute, I’d encourage you to check out that interview. Or even better, to read her essay:
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/st-maximilian-kolbe-and-the-war-against-indifference/