Embracing the Cross

     As I mentioned yesterday, I would like to place before you two examples of stepping up to the plate and witnessing to the power of the Gospel message of Christ. I spoke of one in Tuesday's post - Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), a Carmelite nun who because of both her Jewish origins as well as her faith in Christ in a time of tremendous darkness in the world stands as a shining example of the light of Christ.  Through her death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1945, but more importantly through her journey of Faith, she lifted high the cross as she embraced it.

     The other witness is recognized in his feast today, August 14 (although overshadowed by the 20th Sunday of the Year), and that is Saint Maximilian Kolbe.  Born in occupied Poland in 1894, he entered the Franciscans and was ordained a priest in 1918, seeing his country become free and independent for the first time in 120 years (although short lived - poor Poland).  He founded a newspaper and a Sodality called Knights of Mary Immaculate, and was heavily into publishing and radio.  He went to Japan in 1930 and brought the Christian message to the people of Nagasaki, where he set up a "garden of the Immaculate" which survived the atomic bombing.  Back in Poland, he was arrested in 1941 for sheltering many refugees, many of them Jews.  Sent to Auschwitz, he ministered to his fellow prisoners, and in August of that year he stepped forward and offered his life in place of a prisoner with a family who had been singled out for death by starvation in reprisal for an attempted prison escape.  He was one of the ten who died in that circumstance - of an injection, I believe, since he was lasting too long.  Interestingly, the man whose place he took was present at his canonization.

     Both of these witnesses are not ancient history, but very real modern day witnesses to the brutality of hatred and war and prejudice.  We must begin to learn our lesson if we are to survive, and we must recognize those who embrace the cross as lighting the path.