A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II

St. Maximilian Kolbe was a prolific writer before his arrest by the Gestapo in 1941. He died a prisoner of Auschwitz, but true freedom was his gift to all who suffer.

“There is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends.”

— John 15:13

August 10, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

In his wonderful book, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (Touchstone 1990), author and former Newsweek editor Kenneth L. Woodward wrote that the martyrdom of St. Maximilian Kolbe was one of the most controversial cases ever to come before the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

The essential facts of Kolbe’s martyrdom are well known. After six months as a prisoner of Auschwitz in 1941, Maximilian and the other prisoners of Cell Block 14 were ordered outside to stand at attention for commandant Karl Fritzch. Someone from the block had escaped. To encourage informants, the Commandant had a policy that ten men from the cell block of any escaped prisoner would be chosen at random to die from starvation, the slowest and cruelest of deaths.

The last to be chosen was Francis Gajowniczek, a young man who collapsed in tears for the wife and children he would never see again. Another man, Prisoner No. 16670, stepped forward. “Who is this Polish swine?” the Commandant demanded. “I am a Catholic priest,” Maximilian Kolbe replied, “and I want to take the place of that man.” The Commandant was speechless, but granted the request. Maximilian and the others were marched off to a starvation bunker.

For the next 16 days, Kolbe led the others in prayer as one by one they succumbed without food or water. On August 14, only four, including Maximilian, remained alive. The impatient Commandant injected them with carbolic acid and their bodies were cremated to drift in smoke and ash in the skies above Auschwitz. It was the eve of the Solemnity of the Assumption. God was silent, but it only seemed so. I wrote about this death, its meaning, and the cell where it occurred in “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.”

If that event summed up the whole of Maximilian’s life, it may seem sufficient to be deemed heroic virtue. Today, the name of the brutal Commandant Karl Fritsch is forgotten from history while all the world knows of Maximilian Kolbe, and for far more than his act of sacrifice for someone he barely knew. His act of Consecration to Jesus through Mary was well known long before the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939. As the occupation commenced, Maximilian had a readership of over 800,000 in Poland alone for his monthly magazine, Knights of the Immaculata.

Perceived as a clear threat to the Nazi mindset, he was arrested and jailed for several months in 1939 while his publishing ability was destroyed. Upon his release, he instituted the practice of round-the-clock Eucharistic Adoration for his community decades before it became common practice in parishes.

The Nazi occupiers of Poland were the cruelest foreign rulers in history. A detailed report on conditions of the Nazi occupation compiled and smuggled out of Poland by Catholic priests was made public in Vatican City in October 1941. More than 60,000 Poles were imprisoned in concentration camps, 540,000 Polish workers were deported to forced labor camps in Germany where another 640,000 Polish prisoners of war were also held.

By the end of 1941, 112,000 Poles had been summarily executed while 30,000 more, half of those held in concentration camps, died there. Famine and other deplorable conditions caused a typhus epidemic that took many more lives. By the end of the Nazi terror, six million Jews — fully a third of European Jews — had been exterminated. There are those whose revisionist history faulted the Vatican for keeping silent, but that was not at all the truth. I wrote the real, but shocking truth of this in “Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times.”

Karol Wojtyla

These were also the most formative years for a man who would one day become a priest, and then Archbishop of Krakow in which Auschwitz was located, and then Pope John Paul II. In 1939 as the Nazi occupation of his native Poland commenced, 18-year-old Karol Wojtyla found his own noble defiance. Over the next two years he worked in the mines as a quarryman, and at the Solvey chemical plant while he also took up studies as part of the clandestine underground resistance.

In the fall of 1942, Karol Wojtyla was accepted as a seminarian in a wartime underground seminary in the Archdiocese of Krakow. Two years later, a friend and fellow seminarian was shot and killed by the Gestapo. The war and occupation were a six-year trial by fire in which young Karol was exposed to a world of unspeakable cruelty giving rise to unimaginable heroism.

One of the stories that most impacted him was that of the witness and sacrifice of Father Maximilian Kolbe. He became for Karol the model of a man and priest living the sacramental condition of “alter Christus,” another Christ, by a complete emptying of the self in service to others. In scholarly papers submitted in his underground seminary studies, Karol took up the habit of writing at the top of each page, “To Jesus through Mary,” in emulation of Maximilian Kolbe.

On November 1, 1946, on the Solemnity of All Saints, Karol Wojtyla was ordained a priest in the wartime underground seminary. He was the only candidate for ordination that year. Two weeks later, he boarded a train for graduate theological studies in Rome where, like Maximilian Kolbe before him, he would obtain his first of two doctoral degrees. It was the first time he had ever left Poland.

In 1963, he was named Archbishop of Krakow by a new pontiff, Pope Paul VI. It was alive in him in a deeply felt way that he was now Archbishop of the city of Sister Faustina Kowalska, the mystic of Divine Mercy who died in 1938 and whose Diary had spread throughout Poland having a deep impact on young Karol Wojtyla. And he was Archbishop of the site of Auschwitz, of the very place where the Nazi terror occurred, the place where Maximilian Kolbe offered himself to save another.

I was ten years old the year Karol Wojtyla became Archbishop of Krakow. I was 25, and in my first-year of theological studies in seminary when he became Pope John Paul II. In June of 1979, he made his first pilgrimage as pope to his native Poland. This visit marked the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union and European Communism. During his pilgrimage, Pope John Paul visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps. He knelt on the floor of Block 11, Cell 18 at the very spot in which Maximilian Kolbe died. John Paul kissed the floor where Kolbe had prayed in agony 38 years before. He left there a bouquet of red and white roses, an act with great significance that I will describe below.

When Pope John Paul emerged from his veneration in the starvation cell that June day in 1979, he embraced 78-year-old Franciszek Gajowniczek whose life Maximilian had saved by taking his place in death. I remember this visit. It was the first time I had ever heard of Maximilian Kolbe. I would next hear of him again when he was canonized in 1982, the year of my priesthood ordination. Neither event was without controversy. I recently wrote of my own in “Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost.”

A Martyr in Red and White

But the controversy around the canonization of St. Maximilian Kolbe is much more interesting. It actually changed the way the Church has traditionally viewed martyrdom. Maximilian’s sacrifice of himself at Auschwitz was a story that spread far beyond Catholic circles. In his book, People in Auschwitz, Jewish historian and Auschwitz survivor, Hermann Langbein wrote:

“The best known act of resistance was that of Maximilian Rajmond Kolbe who deprived the camp administration of the power to make arbitrary decisions about life and death.”

In 1971, the beatification process for Maximilian presided over by Pope Paul VI was based solely on his heroic virtue. Two miracles had already been formally attributed to his intercession. Shortly after the beatification, Pope Paul VI received a delegation from Poland. Among them was Krakow Archbishop Karol Wojtyla. In his address to them, Pope Paul VI referred to Kolbe as a “martyr of charity.”

This rankled the Poles and even some of the German bishops who had joined the cause for Maximilian’s later canonization. They wanted him venerated as a martyr. Strictly speaking, however, it did not appear to Paul VI or to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, that Maximilian was martyred for his faith, traditionally the sole standard for declaring a saint to also be venerated as a martyr. Pope Paul VI overruled the Polish and German bishops.

The next Pope, John Paul II, had for a lifetime held Maximilian Kolbe in high regard. In order to resolve the question of martyrdom, he bypassed the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and appointed a 25-member commission with two judges to study the matter. The Commission was presided over by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI.

In the end, on November 9, 1982, the Mass for Canonization of St. Maximilian Kolbe took place at St. Peter’s Basilica before a crowd of 250,000, the largest crowd ever in attendance for a canonization. At the Mass, Pope John Paul II proclaimed:

“And so, in virtue of my apostolic authority I have decreed that Maximilian Maria Kolbe, who after beatification was venerated as a confessor, shall henceforth also be venerated as a martyr.”

The matter was officially settled. Maximilian Kolbe became a saint canonized by a saint. But it was really settled in the mind of John Paul three years earlier on the day when he laid a bouquet of red and white roses on the floor of the Auschwitz starvation cell where Maximilian died.

It was an echo from Maximilian’s childhood. At around the age of ten in 1904, Rajmond Kolbe was an active and sometimes mischievous future saint. He was obsessed with astronomy and physics, and dreamed of designing a rocket to explore the Cosmos. He exasperated his mother, a most ironic fact given his lifelong preoccupation with the Mother of God. One day, his mother was at her wit’s end and she scolded him in Polish, “Rajmond! Whatever will become of you?”

Rajmond ran off to his parish church and asked his “other” Mother the same question. Then he had a vision — or a dream — in which Mary presented him with two crowns, one dazzling white and the other red. These came to be seen as symbols for sanctity and martyrdom, and they were the source for Pope John Paul’s gesture of leaving red and white flowers at the place where Maximilian died.

Epilogue

I witnessed firsthand a similar experience involving the conversion of my friend, Pornchai Moontri who took the name, Maximilian, as his Christian name. He may not have been aware of his mystical heart to heart dialog with the patron saint we both shared. Pornchai is a master woodworker, a skill he has not been able to utilize yet in Thailand because organizing a work place and acquiring tools is a major undertaking.

Around the time of our Consecration to Jesus through Mary, an event I wrote of in “The Doors that Have Unlocked,” Pornchai took up a project. He had perfected the art of model shipbuilding and decided to design and build a model sailing ship named in honor of his Patron Saint. He called it “The St. Maximilian.”

Pornchai chose black for the ship’s hull, but on the night before completing it he had an insight that he had to paint the hull red and white. When I asked him why, he had no explanation other than, “It just seems right.” He could not have known about Maximilian’s childhood vision of the red and white crowns or Pope John Paul’s gesture at Auschwitz.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: This story is filled with irony and coincidence, none of which is really coincidence at all. It is summed up in this quote from St. Maximilian Kolbe, which was sent to me just before I wrote this post:

“For every single human being God has destined the fulfillment of a determined mission on this earth. Even from when he created the Universe, he so directed causes so that the chain of events would be unbroken, and that conditions and circumstances for the fulfillment of this mission would be the most appropriate and fitting.

“Further, every individual is born with particular talents and gifts (and flaws) that are applicable to, and in keeping with, the assigned task, and so throughout life the environment and circumstances so arrange themselves as to make possible the achievement of the goal and to facilitate its unfolding.”

— St. Maximilian Kolbe

Another note from Fr. G: The above quote was found on a bulletin from the National Shrine of St. Maximilian Kolbe in Libertyville, Illinois. It was sent from an unusual source, a retired F.B.I. Special Agent was attending Adoration at the Shrine when he spotted the quote and decided to send it to me. He also sent the message below, which will serve as the first comment for this post.

“During the third week of January of this year, I attended Adoration and the Noon Mass at Marytown, Libertyville, Illinois where The National Shrine of Saint Maximilian Kolbe is located and received a copy of the Marytown Church bulletin. The Shrine is under the sponsorship of the Conventual Franciscan Friars – the religious order that St. Maximilian was a member of. St Maximilian Kolbe was put to death at Auschwitz concentration camp on August 14, 1941 and was ‘cremated’ the next day on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven. He is the patron saint of various groups but perhaps most notably known for being the patron saint of prisoners. Marytown is very much involved in ministry to prisoners throughout the United States by providing Catholic material to Chaplains of prison facilities and other outreach activities.

“The day after this particular visit to Marytown, I was reading the online Catholic League newsletter and saw information about the ‘Laurie List’ and how it pertained to the trial and incarceration of Fr. Gordon MacRae.  The Laurie List was evidently a ‘secret’ list of New Hampshire police officers accessible to prosecutors, who had issues arise questioning their truthfulness and veracity. Any issue that arises as to the truthfulness of a witness particularly a police officer is supposed to be made known to the defendant and his attorney. The Keene NH detective who investigated the case against Fr. Gordon is on this list.  If ‘impeachable’ information regarding this detective was known, this information should have been made available to Fr. Gordon and his defense attorney. I have been following Fr. Gordon’s situation for a number of years and so I am aware of his devotion to St. Maximilian Kolbe.

“After reviewing rules to send mail to the prison housing Fr. Gordon in Concord, New Hampshire, I forwarded the weekly bulletin to him which usually quotes a passage from the writings of St. Maximilian. This has led to a correspondence and receiving Father’s weekly post. Those familiar with Father’s website — Beyond These Stone Walls — are aware of Pornchai Moontri, his tragic life, long period of incarceration, transfer to the NH prison in Concord, becoming the cellmate of Fr. Gordon, Pornchai’s entrance into the Catholic Church — taking a baptismal name of Maximilian — and his ultimate release from prison. I currently try to assist Fr. Gordon’s work (his web site, assistance to Pornchai, etc.) through prayer and financial support.”

One last note from Fr. G: Please visit our “Special Events” page for an update on ways that you can help sustain Beyond These Stone Walls.

Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also wish to visit these related posts:

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

Independence Day in Thailand by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times

Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost

Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — Edith Stein — are honored this week as martyrs of charity and sacrifice.

In a post some years ago I invited our readers to join my friend Pornchai Moontri and me in a personal Consecration to Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s dual movements: the Militia of the Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross. Our Consecration took place at Mass on the night of August 15, the Solemnity of the Assumption, and the day after Saint Maximilian’s Feast Day. Visit the website of the Militia of the Immaculata for instructions for enrolling in the Militia Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross.

We’re very moved by the number of people who have pledged to join us in this Consecration. The invitation remains always open.

Consecration as members of Saint Maximilian’s M.I. or Knights at the Foot of the Cross does not mean I plan to take on any more suffering or that I will never again complain. It does not even mean that I accept with open arms whatever crosses I bear and embrace them.

A person who is unjustly imprisoned must do all in his power to reverse that plight just as a person with cancer must do everything possible to be restored to health. Consecration does not mean we will simply acquiesce to suffering and look for more. It means we embrace the suffering of Christ, and offer our own as a share in it. In the end, I know I cannot empty myself, as Christ did, but I can perhaps attain the attitude of “Simon of Cyrene: Compelled to Carry the Cross,” of which my own is but a splinter.

I have written in the past that history has a tendency to treat its events lightly. The centuries have made Saint Patrick, for example, a sort of whimsical figure. History has distorted the fact that he became the saint he is after great personal suffering. Patrick was kidnapped by Irish raiders at the age of 16, forced from his home and family, taken across the Irish Sea and forced into slavery.

The life and death of Saint Maximilian are still too recent to be subjected to the colored glasses through which we often view history and sainthood. As with nearly all the saints — and with some of us who simply struggle to believe — great suffering was imposed on Maximilian Kolbe and he responded in a way that revealed a Christ-centered rather than self-centered life. What happened to Father Maximilian Kolbe must not be removed from what the Germans would call his “sitz im leben,” the “setting in life” of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. As evil as they were, they were the forges in which Maximilian cast off self and took on the person of Christ.

Scene from the 1978 mini-series “Holocaust”

“And the Winner Is . . .”

Do you remember the television “mini-series” productions of the 1970s and 1980s? After the great success of bringing Alex Haley’s “Roots” to the screen, several other forays into history were aired in our living rooms. One of them was a superb and compelling series entitled “Holocaust” that debuted on NBC on April 16, 1978. It was a brilliant and powerful example of television’s potential.

“Holocaust” won several Emmy Awards for NBC in 1978 for outstanding Limited Series, Best Director (Marvin Chomsky), Best Screenplay (Gerald Green), Best Actor (Michael Moriarty), Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and a number of Supporting Actor and other awards. As a historical narrative, however, “Holocaust” was deeply disturbing and shook an otherwise comfortable generation all too inclined to want to forget and move on. That was a complaint during the famous Nuremberg Trials of 1945 and 1946.

Just two years after the Allied Invasion of Germany and Poland ended the war and exposed the Death Camps, writers complained that Americans had lost interest and were not reading about the Nuremberg Trials. The aftermath of war revealed the sheer evil of the Nazi Final Solution, and it was more than most of us could bear to look at — so many did not look.

As I wrote in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich,” there are some who would have you believe that the Catholic Church is to be the moral scapegoat of the 20th Century. Viewing “Holocaust” (the miniseries) would quickly shatter any such revisionist history. Its first episode was so graphic in its depiction of Nazi oppression, and caused me so much anguish, that I struggled with whether to watch the rest.

I was 25 years old when it first aired, and finishing senior year at Saint Anselm College, a Benedictine school in New Hampshire. I was a double major in philosophy and psychology, and was in the middle of writing my psychology thesis on the relationship between trauma and depression when “Holocaust” kept me awake all night.

The morning after that first episode, I sought out a friend, an elderly Benedictine monk on campus who recommended the series to me. I thought he might tell me to turn my television off, but I was wrong. “This happened in my lifetime,” he said. “We cannot run from it. So don’t look away. Stare straight into its heart of darkness, and never forget what you see.”

He was right, and his words were eerily similar to those of biographer, George Weigel, who wrote of Pope John Paul II and his interest in Saint Maximilian Kolbe in Witness to Hope (HarperCollins, 1999):

Maximilian Kolbe . . . was the ‘saint of the abyss’ — the man who looked into the modern heart of darkness and remained faithful to Christ by sacrificing his life for another in the Auschwitz starvation bunker while helping his cellmates die with dignity and hope.

— Witness to Hope, p. 447

That was what the Holocaust was: “the modern heart of darkness.” I have been a student of the Holocaust since, but I am no closer to understanding it than I was on that sleepless night in 1978. As I asked in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich”:

“How did a society come to stand behind the hateful rhetoric of one man and his political machine? How did masses of people become convinced that any ideology of the state was worth the horror unfolding before their eyes?”

We have all been reading about the breakdown of faith in Europe, and about how decades-old scandals are now being used to justify the abandonment of Catholicism in European culture. This is not a new phenomenon. This madness engulfed Europe just eighty years ago, and before it was over, six million of our spiritual ancestors were deprived of liberty, and then life, for being Jews.

Hitler’s “Final Solution” exterminated fully two-thirds of the Jewish men, women, and children of Europe — and millions of others who either stood in his way or spoke the truth. Among those imprisoned and murdered were close to 12,000 Catholic priests and thousands more women religious and other Catholics. The determination to rid Europe of the Judeo-Christian faith did not begin with claims of sexual abuse, and this is not the first time such claims were used to further that agenda.

The Great Lie and Revealed Truth

This of all weeks keeps me riveted on the Holocaust.  It was in this week that two of my dearest spiritual friends were murdered a year apart at Auschwitz by that madman, Hitler, and his monstrous Third Reich.  Father Maximilian Kolbe traded his life for that of a fellow prisoner on August 14, 1941, and Edith Stein — who became Carmelite Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — was dragged from a cattle train and murdered along with her sister, Rosa, immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.

We must not forget this line from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Vol. 1, Ch.10, 1925): “The great mass of people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” In order for a lie to disseminate and prevail, the truth must be controlled. In 1933, the Third Reich imposed the “Editor’s Law” in Germany requiring that editors and publishers join the Third Reich’s Literary Chamber or cease publishing. In 1933 there were over 400 Catholic newspapers and magazines published in Germany. By 1935 there were none.

The Nazi law was imposed in each country invaded by the Reich. In Poland, Father Maximilian was one of many priests sent to prison for his continued writings, but time in prison did not teach him the lesson intended by the Nazis. He was imprisoned again, and he would not emerge alive from his second sentence at Auschwitz. He was not alone in this. Nearly 12,000 priests were sent to their deaths in concentration camps.

“Come, Let Us Go For Our People.”

Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children in a devout Jewish family in Germany. She was born on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on October 12, l891. As a young woman, Edith broke her mother’s heart by abandoning her Jewish faith in adolescent rebellion. She was also brilliant, and it was difficult to win an argument with her using reason and logic. She was a master of both.

Edith received her doctorate in philosophy under the noted phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, and taught at a German university when the Nazis came to power in 1933. During this time of upheaval, Edith converted to Catholicism after stumbling across the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila. “This is the truth,” Edith declared after reading it through in one sleepless night. A few years after her conversion, Edith Stein entered a Carmelite convent in Germany taking the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Blessed by the Cross).

March 27, 1939 was Passion Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. In response to a declaration of Adolf Hitler that the Jews would bring about their own extinction, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross wrote a private note to her Carmelite superior. She offered herself in prayer as expiation against the Anti-Christ who had cast all of Europe into a spiritual stranglehold. In her letter to her superior, Sister Teresa offered herself as expiation for the Church, for the Jews, for her native Germany, and for world peace.

As the Nazi horror overtook Europe, Sister Teresa grew fearful that she was placing her entire convent at risk because of her Jewish roots. Edith was then assigned to a Carmelite Convent in Holland. Her sister, Rosa, who also converted to Catholicism, joined her there as a postulant.

Catholics in France, Belgium, Holland and throughout Europe organized to rescue tens of thousands of Jewish children from deportation to the Death Camps. Philip Friedman, in Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (The Jewish Publication Society, 1980) commended the Catholic bishops of the Netherlands for their public protest about the Nazi deportation of Jews from Holland. In retaliation for those bishops’ actions, however, even Jews who had converted to Catholicism were rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz.

A 2010 book by Paul Hamans — Edith Stein and Companions: On the Way to Auschwitz — details the horror of that day. Hundreds of Catholic Jews were arrested in Holland in retaliation for the bishops’ open rebellion, and most were never seen again. This information stands in stark contrast to the often heard revisionist history that Pope Pius XII “collaborated” with the Nazis through his “silence.” He was credited by the chief rabbi of Rome, Eugenio Zolli, with having personally saved over 860,000 Jews and preventing untold numbers of deaths.

The last words heard from Sister Teresa as she was forced aboard a cattle car packed with victims were spoken to her sister, Rosa, “Come, let us go for our people.” On August 9, 1942, Sister Teresa emerged from the cramped human horror of that cattle train into the Auschwitz Death Camp to face The Sorting.

Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel described The Sorting:

“How do you describe the sorting out on arriving at Auschwitz, the separation of children who see a father or mother going away, never to be seen again? How do you express the dumb grief of a little girl and the endless lines of women, children and rabbis being driven across the Polish or Ukranian landscapes to their deaths? No, I can’t do it. And because I’m a writer and teacher, I don’t understand how Europe’s most cultured nation could have done that.”

That August 9th, Edith Stein went no further into the depths of Auschwitz than The Sorting. Some SS officer glared at this brilliant 50-year-old nun in the tattered remains of her Carmelite habit, and declared that she was not fit for work. This woman who had worked every day of her life, who taught philosophy to Germany’s graduate students, who scrubbed convent floors each night, was determined to be “unfit for work” by a Nazi officer who knew it was a death sentence.

Edith and Rosa were taken directly to a cottage along with 113 others, packed in, the doors sealed, and they were gassed to death. Their remains, like those of Maximilian Kolbe a year earlier, went unceremoniously up in smoke to drift through the sky above Auschwitz. And Europe thinks it would be better off now without faith!

“Thus the way from Bethlehem leads inevitably to Golgotha, from the crib to the Cross. (Simeon’s) prophecy announced the Passion, the fight between light and darkness that already showed itself before the crib … The star of Bethlehem shines in the night of sin. The shadow of the Cross falls on the light that shines from the crib. This light is extinguished in the darkness that is Good Friday, but it rises all the more brilliantly in the sun of grace on the morning of the Resurrection.

“The way of the incarnate Son of God leads through the Cross and Passion to the glory of the Resurrection. In His company the way of everyone of us, indeed of all humanity, leads through suffering and death to this same glorious goal.”

— Edith Stein/Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross