249 - A Man for Others: Maximilian Kolbe, Saint of Auschwitz in the Words of Those Who Knew Him

A Man for Others: Maximilian Kolbe,
Saint of Auschwitz in the Words of Those Who Knew Him
By Patricia Treece
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1982. 198 pp. $12.95.

What is a Protestant responsibility to Catholic sisters and brothers before this non-critical apologia for the recent canonizing of Maximilian Kolbe? I ask this in anguish, yet I cannot abandon "the Protestant principle" (Paul Tillich).

Assuming Father Maximilian's saintliness-the tears of sensitive readers will assent, particularly where Kolbe volunteers his life for another Auschwitz victim-Treece falls into reporting the falsehood, wearisomely repeated, that Kolbe's spirit/actions were incomparable (cf. especially pp. 163, 178). Our evidence from the death camps simply refutes this allegation. Again, it is at the very highest reaches of spirituality that special pleading assails our beloved Christian church. Why choose this male who is a priest and fellow-countryman of John Paul II? Holocaust self-sacrifice and saintliness were massively incarnate in many other, non-male, non-Polish Catholics.

It remains very sadly questionable that Kolbe ever merited canonization. I refer primarily to his influential and notorious anti-semitic writings and influence within and beyond Poland (cf. Shoah [Fall/Winter 1982-31, 42; Jewish Chronicle [Oct. 15, 1982]), as well as Kolbe's "doubtful spirituality" respecting Mary (cf. National Catholic Reporter, [Oct. 1, 1982]). The author's total silence on these data, in contrast to her careful references to Kolbe's aid to Jews (pp. 92-93) may be countered with the Brandeis University motto: "Truth even unto its innermost parts." Finally, to turn the dead Kolbe into a living, if traditiontypifying, answerer of prayers (p. 181) is to revivify a timeless judgment, "The priest does, after all, deal in magic" (Reinhold Niebuhr).

The Protestant principle renders us positive as well as critical help: How much less sin there is, and how much more peace of soul, in "letting" God determine which are the saints who truly go marching in.

A. Roy Eckardt
Lehigh University
Bethlehem, Pa.