Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

"Kolbe in Nagasaki: The Garden of the Immaculate"

Nagasaki (Japan)

San Maximilian María Kolbe (1894-1941) was a Polish Franciscan conventual, founder of the Militia of the Immaculatea spiritual movement given to the conversion of the world through Mary Immaculate and the press. In 1930 He came to Japan as a missionary with a handful of brothers, with little means, determined to sow the love of the Virgin there as well.

After passing through Tokyo, he chose Nagasaki, a city of deep Christian root and memory of martyrs. On a hillside of Hongochi he founded a convent and apostolic center to which he gave the Japanese name of «Mugenzai no Sono», translated as "Garden of the Immaculate". From there he published a Marian magazine in Japanese, inspired by Polish Knight of the Immaculate ("The Knight of the Immaculate"), to spread faith and devotion to Mary among the Japanese people. All this is documented in the biographies of the saint and in the Franciscan chronicles.

Kolbe remained in Japan until 1936when obedience called him back to Poland. The providence wanted the "Garden of the Immaculate" to be found in an area of Nagasaki which, years later, would be relatively protected from the devastation of the atomic bomb of 1945; the friars count it with gratitude, seeing in it a protection of the Mother, although the providential reading belongs to piety and not to the field of cold data.

Back in his homeland, the supreme hour of his testimony came. Detained by the Nazis, he was placed in the camp of Auschwitz, y en 1941 He volunteered to die instead of a father who was condemned to the hunger bunker. He died a martyr of charity. John Paul II canonized it in 1982, proclaiming it a model of total surrender to Christ by the hands of Mary.

Kolbe's life was a long "Totus Tuus": all of Mary. The man who planted a garden for the Immaculate Conception in Nagasaki and filled the printing press with Hail Marys is the same man who gave his life for a brother in Auschwitz. Such is the Rosary he loved so much: an offering of each bead to the Mother, until love reaches the point of giving everything.