Deacon’s Corner
WOW! The month of August is packed with 15 various Memorials, Solemnities and Feast Days! Each of them is momentous in their own way. You could spend a countless number of hours reading and exploring the richness of each one. Do an online search for any of them to broaden your love for Holy Mother Church. Our Catholic Church is so beautiful in her history!
August 1; Memorial of Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
August 4; Memorial of Saint John Vianney, Priest
August 6; Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord
August 8; Memorial of Saint Dominic, Priest
August 10; Feast of Saint Lawrence, Deacon and Martyr
August 11; Memorial of Saint Clare, Virgin
August 14; Memorial of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Priest and Martyr
August 15; Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
August 20; Memorial of Saint Bernard, Abbot and Doctor of the Church
August 21; Memorial of Saint Pius X, Pope
August 22; Memorial of the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary
August 24; Feast of Saint Bartholomew, Apostle
August 27; Memorial of Saint Monica
August 28; Memorial of Saint Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
August 29; Memorial of the Passion of Saint John the Baptist
If you do not know him, I thought I would introduce you to Saint Maximilian Kolbe and share a snippet of his life. His memorial is August 14, the day he died. Only by Divine Providence did he die the day before the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
St. Maximilian, was born Raymond Kolbe in Poland, on January 8, 1894. In 1910, he entered the Conventual Franciscan Order. He was sent to study in Rome where he was ordained a priest in 1918.
Father Maximilian returned to Poland in 1919 and began spreading his Militia of the Immaculata movement of Marian consecration (whose members are also called MIs), which he founded on October 16, 1917. In 1927, he established an evangelization center near Warsaw called Niepokalanow, the City of the Immaculata. By 1939, the city expanded from 18 friars to an incredible 650 making it the largest Catholic religious house in the world.
To better win the world for the Immaculata the friars utilized the most modern printing and administrative techniques. This enabled them to publish countless catechetical and devotional tracts, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 230,000 and a monthly magazine with a circulation of over one million. Maximilian started a shortwave radio station and planned to build a motion picture studio—he was a true apostle of mass media. He established a City of the Immaculata in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1930, and envisioned missionary centers worldwide.
Maximilian was a ground-breaking theologian. His insights into the Immaculate Conception anticipated the Marian theology of the Second Vatican Council and further developed the Church’s understanding of Mary as Mediatrix of All the Graces of the Trinity, and as Advocate for God’s People.
In 1941, the Nazis imprisoned Father Maximilian in the Auschwitz death camp. There he offered his life for another prisoner and was condemned to a slow death in a starvation bunker. On August 14, 1941, his impatient captors ended his life with a fatal injection. Pope John Paul II canonized Maximilian as a Martyr of Charity in 1982. St. Maximilian Kolbe is considered a patron of journalists, families, prisoners, the pro-life movement and the chemically addicted.
Have a blessed month!
Dcn. Matt Martel