St Maximilian Kolbe in Nagasaki (1930 to 1936)

Raymond Kolbe was born in January 1894 in Poland, at Zduńska Wola.¹³⁵As a young man he joined the Conventual Franciscans, and in 1912 he was sent to Rome to study at the order's international college, the Seraphicum. On 1 November 1914 he made his solemn vows and took the religious name Maximilian Maria.¹On 16 October 1917, still a student, he founded in Rome with a few companions the Militia of the Immaculata, an association of the faithful devoted to the Immaculate Virgin.¹He was ordained priest on 28 April 1918, and said his first Mass the next day at Sant'Andrea delle Fratte, the church where the Virgin had appeared to Alphonse Ratisbonne.¹

He went home to Poland in 1919 with his health broken and spent a long time in the sanatorium at Zakopane. Even there he kept up his priestly work and his service of the Militia.¹In 1922 he began the Militia's magazine, The Knight of the Immaculata, and gave it its own press at the friary of Grodno.¹⁵In 1927 he founded near Warsaw a great friary called Niepokalanów, "the city of the Immaculata," a house of prayer and Franciscan brotherhood that lived by the press.¹It quickly became a centre of vocations.¹For three years he also taught church history at the major seminary in Kraków.³In 1929 he resolved to go to the East.¹

Kolbe left Poland on 26 February 1930 and sailed from Marseille on 7 March.³By way of Saigon and Shanghai he reached Nagasaki on 24 April 1930, with Brother Zeno Żebrowski and a second brother.³²¹On landing he went to visit Ōura Church.¹He came to a diocese that had just received its first Japanese bishop, Januarius Hayasaka Kyūnosuke, and asked him for permission to publish a Catholic magazine. Hayasaka gave it.⁷

The three missionaries rented a house near Ōura and set to work on the apostolate of the press.³On 24 May 1930, one month after they landed, they brought out the first issue of the Japanese Seibo no Kishi, ten thousand copies set in Japanese type.³²It was printed as a supplement to the bishop's diocesan paper.⁷The work was minute: each character had to be chosen by hand and given small reading marks, and sisters and lay Catholics helped to produce it.²The magazine they founded is still published today.²

The house where they began, below Ōura, served as their temporary friary for about a year. The wooden Western house has since burned down, but its brick fireplace survives. Since 1995 the spot has been the St Kolbe Memorial Room, with about seventy photographs, letters and other relics.²Kolbe also taught philosophy at the Ōura seminary for two years.⁷

In April 1931 Kolbe founded a friary at Hongōchi, on the edge of the city, with its own printing house.¹It stands on the slope of Mount Hiko, one of the hills that ring Nagasaki, and the city's own magazine records that Kolbe chose the site himself, saying that it was better to build on the mountain.²He named it Mugenzai no Sono, "the Garden of the Immaculata," and made it, like Niepokalanów, a centre of mission.¹The fruits came quickly. Catechumens increased, and vocations ripened among the young people baptized there, so that a novitiate and a seminary for philosophy and theology were opened in the garden. The magazine passed fifty thousand copies.¹The friars lived in Franciscan poverty, giving themselves to the magazine and to teaching.³

Behind the friary, up a steep path about two hundred metres from the white church, is a grotto with a statue of the Virgin and a spring. The Seibo no Kishi press says that Kolbe had visited Lourdes on his way to the East and had resolved to open a Lourdes for Our Lady in the East; it records the grotto as his gift to the Japanese.³(When it was finished is disputed; see below.) In 1984 the Holy See named the Hongōchi Lourdes an official place of pilgrimage, with a plenary indulgence on the Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Lourdes, the feast of St Maximilian and one day of the pilgrim's choice.³

Kolbe's health was poor in Nagasaki as it had been in Poland. The museum at Hongōchi keeps a chest X-ray and letters of the radiologist Nagai Takashi, who examined Kolbe and diagnosed tuberculosis.²In April 1936 Kolbe opened a minor seminary at the friary, the forerunner of today's Seibo no Kishi school.¹⁴Ten years later Nagai himself taught at that school.⁴

In May 1936 Kolbe sailed from Nagasaki for Poland to attend a chapter of his order. His health did not allow him to come back to Japan.³²He became guardian of Niepokalanów again, and the years from 1936 to 1939 were the high point of its life: about eight hundred friars wrote, printed and spread its publications, and the Polish Knight reached between 750,000 and a million copies.¹

In September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Kolbe took wounded and hungry people into the friary, Christians and Jews alike.¹On 19 September the friars were taken to the camp at Amtitz. They were released in December and returned to Niepokalanów, which was partly wrecked.¹On 17 February 1941 the Gestapo arrested Kolbe. On 28 May he was moved to the concentration camp at Oświęcim, Auschwitz.¹

Pope John Paul II told the story at his canonization: "towards the end of July, 1941, when the camp commander ordered the prisoners destined to die of starvation to fall in line, this man, Maximilian Maria Kolbe, spontaneously came forward and declared himself ready to go to death in the place of one of them."⁶He did so because the condemned man "was the father of a family and his life was necessary for his dear ones."⁶That man, Franciszek Gajowniczek, was still alive in 1982 and was present in St Peter's Square at the canonization.⁶

In the starvation bunker Kolbe led the others in hymns and prayer.¹He was the last of the ten still alive. After more than two weeks of starvation his life was ended with a lethal injection on 14 August 1941, the eve of the Assumption.⁶¹News of his death first reached Japan on 18 May 1943.¹

Pope Paul VI beatified Kolbe on 17 October 1971.¹⁵Ten years later John Paul II, a Pole like Kolbe, came to Nagasaki and on 26 February 1981 visited the Seibo no Kishi friary and the St Kolbe chapel; Nagasaki remembers that he was moved to tears by Kolbe's relics.¹²On 10 October 1982 he canonized him as a martyr, calling him, with Paul VI, the "martyr of love" of Oświęcim.⁶¹His feast is 14 August.⁵

In the homily John Paul II traced the whole of that life back to its source. From his first years in Poland, he said, came "the mysterious dream of two crowns, one white and one red," between which the saint did not choose but accepted both, and from his youth he had been filled with a great love of Christ and a desire for martyrdom. That love and that desire followed him through every place of his Franciscan and priestly service in Poland, "and also of his missionary service in Japan."⁶"The inspiration of his whole life was the Immaculata," the Pope went on, and the mark of Mary was on all his apostolate, at home and in the missions: "both in Poland and in Japan the centre of this apostolate were the special cities of the Immaculata, the Polish Niepokalanów and the Japanese Mugenzai no Sono."⁶The Japanese Conventuals sum up his life in the motto he had longed to fulfil since he was young, Da te ipsum aliis, "give yourself to others."¹

At Hongōchi a cylindrical brick building at the back of the friary, opened in 1986, houses the St Kolbe Memorial Museum.²⁴Its centre is "Kolbe's room," with the simple desk and chair that Brother Zeno made, and around it are his vestments, his liturgical books, his letters, his Nagasaki diary, the type and printing tools of the first Seibo no Kishi, and photographs of the cell at Auschwitz and of Gajowniczek and his family.²

Brother Zeno, who had come with Kolbe in 1930, stayed in Japan when his superior went home. He lived through the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945, and after the war he worked for war orphans and the poor and helped the ragpickers' settlement known as Ari no Machi.²When John Paul II came to Japan in 1981, Zeno received his blessing from a wheelchair, in tears. Nagasaki says he died soon afterwards, as though he had been waiting for that moment, at the age of ninety.²

Kolbe was in Nagasaki for six years. In that time a magazine, a friary, a seminary and a grotto were started that still stand on the hillside at Hongōchi, and his name is now joined to the city's long line of witnesses to the faith.²⁴