A Polish canon who was visiting the Niekalanów printing press one day asked Father Maximilian ironically, “If he were alive today, what would Saint Francis say if he saw these expensive machines?”
And Father Maximilian calmly replied, “He would roll up the sleeves of his habit, he would run the machines at full speed, and he would work alongside these good Brothers using such modern means to spread the glory of God and the Immaculate Virgin Mary.”

Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941)
Franciscan

It is the Gospel ideal itself that the ideologies of our time are attacking. Words alone are of little value when it comes to bringing this Gospel ideal to our contemporaries. Only living examples of the power of divine love can win them over—witnesses to Christian values who are living in their midst, who share their labors, their risks, their sufferings, and their joys as well, but in whom a fullness shines forth that astonishes them and is for them like an experience of God. Our contemporaries are waiting for saints. Consider one who comes to us from Poland; his boundless ambition was to save all souls, and, to fulfill his ambition, he consecrated himself to the Immaculate Virgin, with an obedience that, too, was boundless. People today cannot deny this son of Francis of Assisi on the pretext that he sanctified himself in a medieval setting, for—save for sin—he loved everything about the modern world and used printing presses, radio, and airplanes for God’s sake. In that final circle of concentration camp hell, where men set about dehumanizing other men before killing them, he freely offered his life for another, drawing from the executioners of Auschwitz this word of astonishment: “We’ve never seen anything like this before!”

Mgr Bruno de Solages (1895-1983)
Rector of Catholic College of Toulouse