“Courage, my sons. Don’t you see that we are leaving on a mission? They pay our fare in the bargain. What a piece of good luck! The thing to do now is to pray well in order to win as many souls as possible. Let us, then, tell the Blessed Virgin that we are content, and that she can do with us anything she wishes” (Maximilian Mary Kolbe, when first arrested in 1941).
I'd like to be a good man. I fall very far short. I am offered choices everyday. The choices come down to what exactly have I learned and believe weighed against what is easy, what is safe, what is fun and what is sure to be kept private and out of the public eye against circumstances and necessity. Sixty years of folly, repentance and slips off the path have not fully erased the desire to be a good man.
Modeling ourselves on good people is only a start.
The better of us abandon themselves to better angels - devotion to the spirit and the work of making sense of and combating evil.
A young Polish kid with a devotion to Mary Mother of God, as well as science, prayed for direction. He saw a vision of the Christ's Mother. She offered him a white representing purity and the red rose of martyrdom. This kid chose both and lived up to each. Maximilian Mary Kolbe stepped forward years before his test in Auschwitz Death Camp.
The young Kolbe knew that purity and all that virtue requires was the only path to Red Rose - you can't have one without the other. Martyrs, we like to forget, work at it.
I have a long way to go and a short time to get there.
From Catholic Saints - American Catholic.org
Ordained at 24, he saw religious indifference as the deadliest poison of the day. His mission was to combat it. He had already founded the Militia of the Immaculata, whose aim was to fight evil with the witness of the good life, prayer, work and suffering. He dreamed of and then founded Knight of the Immaculata, a religious magazine under Mary’s protection to preach the Good News to all nations. For the work of publication he established a “City of the Immaculata”—Niepokalanow—which housed 700 of his Franciscan brothers. He later founded one in Nagasaki, Japan. Both the Militia and the magazine ultimately reached the one-million mark in members and subscribers. His love of God was daily filtered through devotion to Mary.
In 1939 the Nazi panzers overran Poland with deadly speed. Niepokalanow was severely bombed. Kolbe and his friars were arrested, then released in less than three months, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception.
In 1941 he was arrested again. The Nazis’ purpose was to liquidate the select ones, the leaders. The end came quickly, in Auschwitz three months later, after terrible beatings and humiliations.
A prisoner had escaped. The commandant announced that 10 men would die. He relished walking along the ranks. “This one. That one.” As they were being marched away to the starvation bunkers, Number 16670 dared to step from the line. “I would like to take that man’s place. He has a wife and children.” “Who are you?” “A priest.” No name, no mention of fame. Silence. The commandant, dumbfounded, perhaps with a fleeting thought of history, kicked Sergeant Francis Gajowniczek out of line and ordered Father Kolbe to go with the nine. In the “block of death” they were ordered to strip naked, and their slow starvation began in darkness. But there was no screaming—the prisoners sang. By the eve of the Assumption four were left alive. The jailer came to finish Kolbe off as he sat in a corner praying. He lifted his fleshless arm to receive the bite of the hypodermic needle. It was filled with carbolic acid. They burned his body with all the others. He was beatified in 1971 and canonized in 1982.
https://www.americancatholic.org/features/saints/saint.aspx?id=1107
