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Catholic Saints
St. Maximilian Kolbe
00:24:28
Saint Maximilian Kolbe's life mirrors that of Christ, as he chose to suffer and die so that another might live, even while enduring constant affliction in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Those who witnessed Saint Maximilian's heroic act recalled how he transformed a prison camp into a cathedral through his unceasing praise of God. Hear Taylor Kemp and special guest Anthony D'Ambrosio discuss Saint Maximilian Kolbe and his witness of living a meaningful life by embracing the cross of Christian life.
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Taylor Kemp
Foreign.
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Podcast Host/Announcer
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.
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Taylor Kemp
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Catholic Saints Podcast. I am Taylor Kemp, who used to be host of this show, but am not any longer. You are now normally listening to and accustomed to the wonderful date, Dr. Elizabeth Klein, but she is not here today. So sorry that you're back. With me today we have a special guest, Anthony d'. Ambrosio. Anthony is the writer and director of a film on Saint Maximilian Kolbe called Triumph of the Heart. If you haven't heard of it, give it a Google. Check it out. Depending on what time of year you're listening to this, it might be in theaters, but you can find it somewhere. We are talking today about St. Maximilian Colby, and it's great pleasure to have Anthony here with us. He's been spending years in the story of Saint Maximilian Kolbe and then bringing that story to life through his film. So, Anthony, it's great to have you. Welcome to the podcast.
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Anthony d'Ambrosio
Hey, thank you so much for having me.
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Taylor Kemp
So, Anthony, I thought, you know, we. We've done an episode of Catholic saints on St. Maximilian Kolbe. Listeners out there, if you want to get the kind of quick sketch of his life, I highly recommend checking that out. It walks through who Maximilian Kolbe is, kind of how he came to be, who he was, but it's broad. I would say that's with Dr. Sean Innards and Dr. Ben Akers. Today on this special episode, we're going to get a little narrower and we're going to go a little bit deeper. So we're going to talk to Anthony about the period of Saint Maximilian Colby's life that he depicts in his film and ask him, you know, what he learned, what he thought about it, and how we can draw some insight to help us in our life of discipleship. Maximilian Colby was born in 1894. He died in 1941 in Auschwitz on the eve of the Assumption, on October, on August 14th. And he has a really heroic story. So again, check out the full sketch of that. So, Anthony, let's turn to the part of the story that you dove into in Triumph of the Heart. What did you cover in the film? Where is it in Colby's life? And why did you start there?
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Anthony d'Ambrosio
Yeah, so our film actually starts with kind of the moment that most people tend to end the story with, which is this iconic moment of him stepping out of line to trade places with another man saving his life. And volunteering to join nine other men in this starvation bunker in the darkest place on earth in Auschwitz at the time. And I think that the reason why I was really fascinated with this particular moment of Colby's life, beyond the fact that it's sort of like the Passion of the Christ, but the Passion of Colby. And obviously those sorts of moments are perhaps the most dramatic moments of somebody's kind of climactic movement towards holiness, But I think also the sort of national battle between Poland and Polish identity as a sort of an enmeshment of Catholicism and this sort of historic pride of Polish culture versus the Germanic Nietzschean fascism that was the dominant power in the world at the time. I think that these two, like Colby's story, is as much a story about a saint and about Catholicism as much as it was also a story about Poland and Germany and the. The conflict between the Catholic culture of Poland as a country and its patriotism versus the sort of new modern culture of death present, of willpower that was being brought forward by the Nazis. And I found that to be an incredibly inspiring angle to talk about that was really interesting that I had never really heard before, before I started to kind of do this deep dive into who Colby was.
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Taylor Kemp
So. Yeah, and that does set the stage very nicely. And again, we're not going to cover too much of it, but Colby was this great evangelist where he was directly battling these ideas against each other, and he's publishing about these. How did he get into the concentration camp?
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Anthony d'Ambrosio
Yeah. So obviously, Maximilian Colby was like the Bishop Baron or the Mother Angelica of his age, was one of the first Catholics to use mass media for the sake of evangelization and was building this great media conglomerate, media empire, really. And of course, when an invading force comes into a country, their first question is, who are the influential people in this country? If we want to subjugate this country to our own agenda and our own will, we either have to get these people on board with our agenda or we have to figure out how to get rid of them. And the Nazis were, as they were with everything, like, incredibly efficient with this. They. They found ways to present tests to people to see are you going to be loyal? And then systemize that test. And anybody that, you know, A or B, they have two paths. B path is Auschwitz. At the time, for anybody that was in Polish, in a place of influence, Polish culture. So at the time, Auschwitz was not just a part. It wasn't used for the Holocaust. That hadn't really gotten off, kicked off in Mass yet. Really, it was formed and shaped by the desire of the Nazis to destroy the Polish identity and Polish culture so that they could kind of import the Germanic kind of ideals into Poland and. And sort of assimilate it into. Into itself. And so when Colby was in Auschwitz, his stepping out of line was not just a stepping out of line for the sake of, like, this saving this other man's life. It was really like a political act as well, because it was standing directly against the soul, crushing the literally, like the soul crushing weight of. Of the German agenda. And in this very visible, direct way, it was sort of claiming that the Polish spirit and the human spirit ultimately could not be subjugated by this kind of oppressive force. And, of course, when he steps into the cell with these nine other men, he now has this opportunity. And I think it's really interesting to know as well that at that time, it's very possible that this man that had escaped could have been found. He could have been found and returned to the camp, and everybody could have been set free. It was not unheard of for that to happen. So the deal was not that they were just put in there to die, but they would be put in there until that person was found or they died. So at least it starts out that you could see that there could be this sort of pastoring heart being brought to life there and an idea that while he's in the cell, there's nothing else that they could be that they could do to these men. And so even though acts of patriotism, like singing songs, which for the Polish, singing a Catholic hymn is a patriotic act, because, like, in Poland, these things are one in the same. Like, Mary is the queen of Poland. Right? So you. As we were digging into this story and, like, researching songs, you kind of have this really, like, strange confluence of, like, Marian hymn and, like, Polish anthem, Like, they are, like, kind of one and the same. And so we're like, if. If they're singing songs like this out of the window in a place where all religious and patriotic acts are forbidden and frankly, are like, trying to be snuffed out, then you can see this. This sort of. This portrait of a man who is like a great patriot and a man who is a great Catholic father and priest who is making a stand for the voice in the heart of his country. And I found that to be incredibly beautiful.
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Taylor Kemp
It is. So take us into the. Into the bunker in where you guys are, where you. Where you go with the film. So St. Maximilian, Colby, he's in. He's in the bunker. He's with these nine other men. What's going on? And why did you guys set it up in the way that you did? And what were you trying to accomplish through the story that you got in the way that you told it?
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Anthony d'Ambrosio
Yeah. So we actually know quite a bit about what happened inside of the bunker because there was a. A Polish prisoner who is like the. The translator that the German soldiers would go into the cell every day to. To look for dead bodies and. And drag them out, presumably to present disease or prevent disease and also to. To deter from cannibalism. And so this kind of every morning ritual of the Germans coming in with this translator allowed there to be an eyewitness to what was happening inside of the cell. And so one of the things that we do know is that the men started separated, Colby being in the middle of the cell, immediately beginning to pray the rosary and singing these. These hymns. And that throughout the course of the next 14 days, all of these men were found together, holding onto each other, comforting each other. That Colby was kind of the central figure. We have these amazing portraits of eyewitnesses who painted like Colby in these kind of grotesque, like, Pieta type images, holding these other men in their. In their starvation. And ultimately he was able to bring them to staying alive with him. That there were three other men who actually survived all the way to the point where on the 14th day, the Nazis are. Are just completely fed up with this. What is happening, because not only are these other men beginning to sing, but in this whole prison block, all of the other inmates who are being tortured in various different ways, being imprisoned in different ways, this is the most terrifying place inside of the most terrifying place on Earth. This is the place in Auschwitz where nobody wanted to go. And all of them are beginning to pick up the songs that Kolbe is singing, singing in harmony. So much so that this translator described going into the prison while Maximilian Colby was there as if it was a religious experience. That it sounded like this place was like a cathedral. And if you're familiar with, like, Auschwitz, that this sort of soundscape that would have been going on here would have been such a massive transformation that you can only imagine how much that would have aggravated the Nazis. And you can see why after 14 days, it wasn't just like, clear the cell. We got to make space. It was like these guys are like, are staging a revolution. Yeah, like, against everything that we're trying to do right now. They're just. They're beating us, you know, like this.
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Taylor Kemp
Frail, fragile, broken men, like, are are beating the.
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Anthony d'Ambrosio
The. This whole kind of Nietzsche and willpower. Like, we can dominate you because you're a lower race. Like, all of that stuff is just completely, like, diffused by Colby's testimony. And so they go ahead and they. And there were actually three other men. Colby was the last one to die, but there were three other men who were also executed with him. So if you kind of look at the shape of that story, you can see this incredibly dramatic event in Polish history that, of course, it was remembered not just because of this moment of sacrifice, but because this was a priest who in some way saved the soul of Poland in its. In its most, like, dark night.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah, it was just this light of hope. Right. Like, what a gift. I mean, you know, it's impossible to imagine what. What it would have been like, but just, like, the. The. How hopeless the situation was. And then to make. To have Colby be this. This, like, pastor of hope. You can imagine how powerful that would be if you're one of these other men, and how contagious that would be. But just what. Yeah. And how maddening that would have been to the Nazis. But it's incredible. So you. You. You know, obviously, Colby's story is a great witness of hope, this great kind of resistance of hope, you could say. What other themes did you guys kind of wrestle with in the film?
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Anthony d'Ambrosio
Yeah, well, I guess I think the. All of the themes tie up to one. One overarching theme of hope. Like, that is a good movie, actually, is. Is laser focused on one theme. But inside of that, I think that you. What we're trying to do is to show the conflicts between how different people deal with suffering. So, like, there's grief, there's denial, there's this, like, Nietzsche and kind of, you know, the Nazis are presenting this like we just, by our own willpower, get to decide how the world is going to be and shape it according to our own. Our own, I guess, agendas. And you have. You have sort of the communist agenda at the time, which is kind of doing a similar thing from a different direction. And so I think that what. What we were trying to do with the film was ultimately to present all of the different, I guess, bones of the culture of death that was in some way eating the world at the time. And to show Colby as this, like, as the Christian response to all of the things that now are very relevant because they've shaped our culture. They might not be as dramatically present as they were in the war, but they're still sort of like the foundational ideas that are. That are fighting for attention in our culture.
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Taylor Kemp
Yep. Yeah. And it's just, you know, his story is so obviously Christ. Like, you know, Christ descends into humanity. He descends into hell. Colby descends kind of to stand willingly for this man. And you get these two paradoxes of, as you're saying, the kind of Nietzschean, like, will to power versus just this surrender and that. They're both responses to, like, the. The struggle of humanity. Right. You can. You can take. Try to take all control, or you can surrender to a good God. And the Nazi response is this, like, very aggressive and fast and effective will to power that is eminently destructive. Um, and then you have this, like, this slow, sacrificial martyrdom of love that Christ gave us the model for that you see Colby doing. And you say one triumphs over the other in the long run, but it doesn't, you know, subvert the. The. The painful, short right of it. So I guess, you know, the question I'd have is, is as you've been going through this film and you've been wrestling with this story, you know, what do you think people. How can. How can it speak to people today? What kind of things can they take home? Or what are the things as. That you experienced making the film as it's, you know, kind of. How do you wrestle with hope, with suffering, and how to respond to it? What can people kind of integrate in their own spiritual lives today?
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Anthony d'Ambrosio
Yeah, I would say that there's two main things that I want to say to that. One is that we are a people that are meant to shoulder heavy burdens as a. As a faith and as a. As sort of a. A church and a kingdom of God. Our stance in this world is very much like, pick up your cross and follow me. And for Colby, that cross was the suffering of his country, of the entire Polish people, that he was kind of taking on his back and accepting. And I think for all of us, we live in a culture that really says you are meant to be comfortable, you are meant to be taken care of, and that things should be made as easy as possible for you. And the underneath underbelly of that is there's no real meaning or purpose or point to suffering. Like, the best thing to do with that suffering is to just sort of try to stamp it out and get rid of it. And whether that's through political power and sort of trying to sort of shape the world to make it more just, you know, whatever, but there isn't really a sense of reason to do hard self sacrificial things in that worldview. And for us, the decision to get married and have children, the decision to love a person with your whole heart and with your loyalty, or to be obedient, even in the context of the church or I guess, service to an organization that you're working for in a job. Like all of these things are mini crosses, right? But the world is made a better place when we are accepting that cross and choosing it and shouldering it. And when we abdicate that as a people, because we want to be comfortable, the world will unravel. There's actual, like, political, global, universal stakes to the decision about what we do with our suffering. And so the. The second thing that I would say, Colby's story, you know, firstly shows us what it's like to accept the cross, accept the burdens of our age and our time, and to. To live in love with hope in the midst of that. The second one is Colby was able to do that not because of this great discipline that he had, even though he was an incredibly disciplined man, but his motivation stemmed very directly from his love of Mary and his vision from heaven that he had this very clear, palpable dream. When he was in Japan on death's door, suffering from tuberculosis, he had this very clear dream of heaven that profoundly shaped his life. And I would warrant and wager that the power that he had to say yes to God in such a dramatic circumstance came from his assurance and his. His sense of what heaven was and that it was like waiting for him on the other side of this. I think that the joy of the gospel and the joy that we have as Catholics, even in the midst of our suffering and our toil comes from our ability to sort of feast in preparation and in anticipation of what's there for us on the other side. And I think that if we are not building a. An anticipation, desire, yearning image of what heaven looks like, then we're not going to be prepared to make those sacrifices. Because life and humanity, we have to be honest, our desires are the things that ultimately drive us to do the things that we're going to do. So the strength of our desire for heaven, I think, is a big part of what makes us willing and able to shoulder the burdens that God has for us.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah, and I couldn't agree more. And it's also the, you know, that mysteriously that those, you know, kind of an obedience to the will of God as we are able to. To. To perceive it and shouldering those burdens like it's at one time difficult, but it's actually very fulfilling too. Like, for anybody out there, I've been there. Where you're living for yourself, it's just torture. It really is. And if you haven't been there and like, it just when you live through it, it really is terrible.
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Anthony d'Ambrosio
Yeah.
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Taylor Kemp
And then when you, you know, when you earnestly take up a desire to, to love God with one's mind, heart, soul and strength and love neighbor as yourself and. And we'd all do that imperfectly, but take up a love for the other, it's very difficult. It's difficult to do. It's difficult because you fail at it. So it's like for all these reasons, but it's like also the best thing. And you know that. But it still is a challenge. And so it's. Yeah, you know, Colby, he's such a great model of taking on, you know, he took on Poland, like he took. He put Poland on his shoulders, right, like, and what a heavy burden. And he paid the ultimate price. And so not only did heaven await him, and this mystical vision strengthened him for that, but it's also, one must believe in faith. And maybe you've, in his writings have found like that there was this mystical peace that abides in the soul when one is living in accord. And that's what we seek so desperately. And that can come. It is mysterious because it is challenging. But, you know, like, my yoke is heavy and my burden light or yoga is easy. Yes. Flipped it. Listen to Anthony. Yeah, so, I mean, it's a profound.
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Anthony d'Ambrosio
Slip actually, because, like, if you're saying my yoke, then it is heavy. If it's the yoke of my own kind of control and taking, then it will be a suffocating burden. Whereas, like when the Lord gives us a burden, has this strange combination, like paradoxically, it's always the heaviest one. Like in the eyes of the world, in some ways the power for carrying it is also supplied. So it's the lightest in the way that it feels. And so, yeah, I think that God's. The crosses that God gives us. We almost always think too small for like what we. We can handle. Not almost, we always do. Certainly for me, I could never have comprehended the sort of burden of making this film and telling Colby's story as an American that's not a Pole, you know, and as a first time filmmaker with no budget to tell something such, such big, sweeping, huge, important story. But. But God made it incredibly light. Like he continually supplied the energy and the love that was necessary to sort of. To do it. And so yeah, I think the biggest and most important thing in all of it is to say yes to what God is doing and let him expand your vision, but also to do so with that view of heaven on the other side.
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Taylor Kemp
Yep, I think that's a great place to end it. So again, everybody with me is Anthony d'. Ambrosio. He is the writer and director of Triumph of the Heart. Give it a search so you can go see it. It's a really exciting and great film. So Anthony, thank you for all your work on the film. Thank you for joining us on Catholic Saints and thank you to everyone out there for joining us today. We will see you next time on Catholic Saints.
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Podcast Host/Announcer
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