Your praises we sing Maximilian Kolbe.

Eighty-five years ago a most momentous October took place: the Bolshevik coup launched Russia into the bloody darkness of atheistic communism; twelve days earlier, the Mother of God had appeared for the sixth consecutive month to three children in Fatima, Portugal. She asked that Russia be consecrated to her Immaculate Heart, and exhorted people to conversion, penance and prayer.

That same October, in the quiet austerity of a Franciscan seminary in Poland, a young man inflamed with love for Mary founded the Militia Immaculata--the Knights of the Immaculate (MI).

The young man was Maximilian Kolbe, and he was clear about the goal of the MI: nothing less than conquering the world for Jesus, through Mary, particularly through the practice of total consecration to her, whom he called "the Immaculate."

Although this frail friar with the penetrating gaze suffered from consumption, and often was so consumed with anxiety that his superior finally forbade him to worry, he was shrewd, canny and tough as nails. As a Franciscan priest, he took up the apostolate of the press: despite great deprivation, he and his friars published several periodicals from their community Niepokalanow (the City of the Immaculate), including the monthly The Knight, which had a circulation of 700,000.

The love of the Trinity in Maximilian Kolbe's soul bore the fruit of martyrdom, when he laid down his life for another in the dehumanizing and brutal world of the Nazi death camp. Fr. Maximilian, canonized by John Paul II in 1982, offered to take the place of another prisoner condemned to die by starvation. After 14 days, the saint, still alive, was finally dispatched by means of an injection of carbolic acid. He died on the eve of the feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1941.

Fr. Kolbe had initially been arrested in September 1939, but was released on December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. When arrested for the final time in February 1941, he was in the midst of dictating a theological treatise on this Marian dogma--which the Church proclaimed in 1854.

One gets to know the Immaculate better through "humble prayer" than through "definitions and distinctions," St. Maximilian wrote, but still, the latter should not be neglected. "We have to make use of words taken from the vocabulary of creatures, because we have no others," he cautions. But with these imperfect tools, the saint elaborated with luminous lucidity on the Immaculate Conception.

In the Triune life of love, God the Father eternally begets the Son, who is eternally begotten. The Holy Spirit is the "fruit of love of the Father and the Son. The fruit of a created love is a created conception. Hence the fruit of this love, of the prototype of all created love, can also be nothing but a conception. Hence the Holy Spirit is an uncreated conception, an eternal one."

Love is union, writes the saint, and Mary is "joined in an ineffable manner to the Holy Spirit because she is his spouse." In the physical union of love between a man and a woman, the two become one flesh. "In an incomparably more rigorous, more interior, more essential manner the Holy Spirit lives in the soul of the Immaculate, in her very being, and makes her fruitful from the first instance of her existence and throughout her life, that is, forever. This uncreated Immaculate Conception conceives divine life immaculately in the soul of Mary, his Immaculate Conception. The virginal womb of her body, too, is reserved for him who conceives there in time--everything material comes about according to time--the divine life of the God-man."

We, too, are "called to be mothers of God, bearing Jesus Christ in human souls." And this can be effected by consecrating ourselves to Mary, "to be changed into her, that she alone remains, so that we may be as much hers as she is God's. She belongs to God, having become his Mother. And we want to become the mother who would give the life of the Immaculate to every heart that exists and to those that will still come into existence...

"Thus, entering these hearts and taking full possession of them, she may give birth to sweet Jesus, who is God, that he might grow in them in age and perfection."

Lianne Laurence is a freelance writer in Toronto. The quotes are taken from The Kolbe Reader, edited by Fr. Anselm Romb and published by Franciscan Marytown Press.