A relic of St Maximilian Kolbe is to tour churches and chaplaincies in Aberdeen this month.
To mark the 75th anniversary of St Maximilian’s martyrdom at Auschwitz, where he took the place of a man condemned to death, a reliquary containing hairs from his beard will be taken to various locations across the Diocese of Aberdeen between January 20 and 22, including Pluscarden Abbey in Elgin and the University of Aberdeen.
The reliquary, which was made in 1971 when Kolbe was still Blessed, stands on a base which is the outline of his native Poland, covered in the “thorns” of Nazi occupation, but out of which a lily and a tulip are growing, to represent purity and martyrdom.
Friar Maximilian Martin of the University of Aberdeen Chaplaincy said: “Throughout his life, St Maximilian mirrored so clearly the selfless living and sharing of the Gospel, exemplified through the lives of St Francis and Our Lady to whom as a Conventual Franciscan, he was so devoted. St Maximilian is known as The Apostle of Our Difficult Age and through the veneration of his relics, we can be blessed through a connection to that holiness and inspired to share that same Gospel love in our own time and way”.
St Maximilian is also a patron of recovering drug addicts, political prisoners, journalists and of the pro-life movement. He was born in 1894 at Zdunska Wola to an ethnic German father and Polish mother. He took a doctorate in philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and was ordained a priest three years later in 1918. Between 1930 and 1936, he embarked on a series of missions to Japan and later to India. He met his death at Auschwitz in 1941 after being moved by the despairing cry of another prisoner Franciszek Gajowniczek who was one of a group of men forced to stand in the full heat of the sun as punishment for the escape of another prisoner. He was canonized as a martyr of charity by Pope John Paul II in October 1982.
Photo - A wax figure of Father Kolbe in 'Polonia' Wax Museum, Krakow.
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