Today (August 14) is the feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe, but since it falls on a Sunday this year we celebrate the Sunday Mass rather than the Saint. But as you attend Mass today, gaze up into the beautiful stained-glass figure of St. Maximilian in the windows above the choir area. He was a man of exceptional gifts, who managed the largest printing house in Poland at the time and the largest community of friars in the world (over 700 brothers) outside of Warsaw. And yet he did not hesitate to give it all over when the Gestapo arrested him for being a Catholic priest in 1941. They took him to the most horrible of all concentration camps, Auschwitz, where he lived for three months, giving his only bread to other men, hearing their confessions and leading them in the rosary. He brought hope into that hopeless place. His source of joy and strength? Jesus in the Eucharist, of course, but right beside Jesus was the Immaculata, His Blessed Mother. “Our Lady has a special purpose for us in this place [Auschwitz],” he told a fellow prisoner. St. Maximilian gave his life freely to save a condemned man, starving to death in his place with nine others in Nazi reprisal for an escapee. He died on August 14, 1941; his body was burned in Hitler’s ovens, and the smoke of his offering was assumed into the skies on the eve of the Assumption of Our Lady.

   Tomorrow the Church celebrates the very same Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Fourth Glorious Mystery of the Holy Rosary. My mother explained this mystery to us children one day, and I will never forget her radiant confidence that, after all life’s trials, God will take us up to heaven like Blessed Mary, if we do not lose faith in Him. She has gone back to God, body and soul. Someday, you and I will be with Him, and all our loved ones, body and soul. “Where she has gone, we hope to follow.”

   Because tomorrow’s Solemnity falls on a Monday, many Dioceses (including ours) have removed the obligation to attend Mass. But I encourage you to attend one of our Masses, either the 8am or the 5:45pm. You will rejoice in the mystery of Her Assumption with all the Holy Ones. I will be in Madrid with our young pilgrims, beginning the events of World Youth Day. The Pope will arrive on Thursday. My next laptop will be a report of our pilgrimage, sent from Spain.