Who is the real Immaculate Conception?

The feast day of St Maximilian Kolbe and the solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary occur side by side, the latter coming the day after. This is fitting not only because Kolbe was given the lethal injection in Auschwitz the day before the solemnity, but because he was also possessed by a deeply Marian spirituality. For some people, though, he might have been a bit too Marian.

As a Franciscan friar, the Polish saint organised a group called the Militia Immaculatae (Army of the Immaculate One), dedicated to the conversion of people through the intercession of Mary. He also founded a periodical called the Knight of the Immaculata. In his missionary travels to China, Japan and India, he tried to establish the newspapers there as well. Fundamental to his work was the spreading of devotion and consecration to the Blessed Virgin. In some ways this is unsurprising, since he recounts that as a young boy Mary appeared to him in a vision, offering him two crowns:

one white and one red. She looked at me with love and asked me if I would like to have them. The white meant that I would remain pure and the red that I would be a martyr. I answered yes, I wanted them. Then the Virgin looked at me tenderly and disappeared.’

Not everybody is comfortable with a strong Marian spirituality, feeling as though it takes away from having a spirituality grounded in Christ. This is a fair enough intuition and a lot of people feel this way. In fact, some people might think that Mary’s status in the Catholic Church is one that makes her practically divine. This is especially so because when Mary appeared to St Bernadette at Lourdes, she announced herself by saying, ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’ According to Fr Michael Gaitley, in his book 33 Days to Morning Glory (2011), this was actually one of the problems that Kolbe wrestled with for a long time, almost his entire life. Even in his day, this intuition was something people struggled with. It was only two hours before his arrest by the Gestapo, on 17 February 1941, that he penned a theological reflection beginning to resolve this, the most important reflection of his life.

‘Who are you, O Immaculate Conception?’

In this reflection, Kolbe says that the Holy Spirit is, in actual fact, the Immaculate Conception. At least, he is the original, uncreated Immaculate Conception. The reason he says this is because the very life of God – Father, Son and Spirit – consists in an eternal act of begetting, of giving life, in some sense. Obviously, since we’re talking about God, there is no actual beginning to this life. It’s an analogy. It’s a bit like when Fulton Sheen talked about the Holy Spirit being the ‘breath of love’ between the Father and the Son; for Kolbe, the Spirit is the uncreated fruit of the love between the Father and the Son, the divine and eternal ‘conception’, pure and sinless. Immaculate.

Perhaps this makes the problem worse. Why would Mary call herself the Immaculate Conception if that’s one of the proper names of the Holy Spirit?

The analogy Kolbe uses is that of a woman taking the name of her husband. When she does this, it is symbolic of their marital union. In calling herself the Immaculate Conception, then, Mary was doing nothing other than taking the name of her spouse: the Holy Spirit, the one who was ‘uncreated Love’ and dwelt in her from the first moment of her existence. Theirs is, Kolbe says, ‘an interior union.’

Earlier in the reflection, Kolbe mentioned how every created reality bears an ‘echo’ of the divine and eternal reality of God, to greater or lesser degrees. Being immaculately conceived, Mary embodies in her life a faithful echo of this eternal reality of the Holy Spirit. She doesn’t take away from it – she reveals it.

‘Only love creates’

St Maximilian Kolbe has a famous line attributed to him: ‘only love creates.’ If we can begin to tap into this mystery, then we can also begin to tap into the mystery of the Assumption, too.

The devil, Jesus says in John’s Gospel, ‘was a murderer from the start’ and ‘the father of lies’ (8:44). His whole kingdom is organised around deceit and the taking of life. Love, on the other hand, is the very reality of God and it does not lie or destroy. It only gives. It only creates. This was fundamental to Christ’s mission on earth: overcoming this kingdom of lies and destruction in order to establish a new creation no longer ruled by death and decay and violence.

In his document proclaiming the dogma of the Assumption, Munificentissimus Deus, Pope Pius XII said that there was an intimate connection between the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption (§4). Reflecting on Kolbe, we might be able to understand why. If Mary did have a unique relationship to the Holy Spirit, the uncreated and eternal Immaculate Conception who is Love, then it is indeed fitting that she should not suffer decay but have been preserved bodily into eternal life. Because love does not destroy. It only creates.

Kolbe witnessed to this truth in Auschwitz. As punishment for someone trying to escape, the SS camp commander selected ten men at random to be starved to death in an underground bunker. One of them was a father whose family was present. Kolbe volunteered to take his place. After two weeks, when everyone else had died, they finally decided to give up starving him and give the lethal injection instead. As a result of this, Kolbe has been declared a martyr. He did not die specifically as a result of the faith, but Pope John Paul II, in declaring him a martyr, wanted us to know that the Nazi regime existed fundamentally as a hatred for humanity, and thus also a hatred of the Christian faith.

The word “martyr” means “witness”. Kolbe certainly witnessed to the love that creates and gives.