Kolbe's Gift to the Jews

As a Jew, albeit one who has received the grace to recognize the Catholic Church as the fulfillment of the promise God made to the Jews, and as the son of German-Jewish holocaust refugees, I find it particularly offensive that St Maximilian Kolbe—who has done so incalculably much to aid the Jews—is the object of calumnies accusing him of anti-Semitism. I would like to take this opportunity to address this unfounded libel.

The accusations against Kolbe seem to fall into two categories—that he held to an "anti-Semitic" personal theology, and that anti-Semitic writings were published in his Knight of the Immaculata.

Addressing the first category first, if the Catholic faith is true, then there is something fundamentally flawed in the theology of a Jew who rejects Jesus as the Messiah of Judaism. Kolbe should not be accused of being an anti-Semite simply for believing in the fullness of Catholic doctrine!

Then there is the issue of Kolbe's attitude towards Jews who actively engaged in what he saw as destructive social movements. There is no doubt that he considered that the Jews who were actively promoting Communism and freemasonry were working for the forces of evil. Again, Kolbe cannot be accused of anti-Semitism for being strongly morally opposed to what they were doing.

For having discarded the possibility of the Messiah-hood of Jesus Christ, their rightful desire for a betterment for mankind's condition—a "messianic" impulse, if you will, which might be particularly pronounced among Jews given their God-given role to pray for the coming of the Messiah—had to search for other outlets, sometimes tragically falling on ones diametrically opposed to all that was truly good for the future of man.

It is also true that Kolbe mistakenly put credence in the anti-Semitic libel of the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so did almost the entire non-Jewish world at the time.

When Kolbe was in Asia anti-Semitic writings were published in Kolbe's Knight of the Immaculata. Kolbe prompted reprimand the redactors (letter written by Father Kolbe in Nagasaki to Father Marion on July 12, 1935, acting editor of the Knight back in Poland).

While head of the friary in Poland Kolbe fed, clothed and sheltered thousands of Jews who had nowhere else to turn—often at the expense of adequate resources for his own monks. And in Auschwitz he gave love and hope, and much of his meager ration of bread, to Jewish as well as non-Jewish fellow prisoners.

Because through his own identification with the suffering Christ, and his presence and his prayers and his love for his fellow-prisoners, he was perhaps able to serve as an intermediary in uniting the suffering of even his fellow-prisoners who did not know Christ with those of our Savior and Redeemer, and thereby ensure that their sufferings and deaths too would have redemptive value, for themselves, for their co-religionists, and for the world.

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Roy Schoeman

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(from Kolbe, Saint of the Immaculata, ed. Bro. Francis Mary Kalvelage, F.I.)