75th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of St. Maximilian Kolbe
Week 35
Did Hitler win?
The Nazis were defeated, Hitler committed suicide and the concentration camps were liberated, so how can one ask if Hitler won?
Because the effects and attitudes of Hitler and the Nazis continue unabated throughout the world.
The unborn and the terminally ill are the new Jews!
Only by remembering the Jews in the Holocaust can we remember the sacredness and sanctity of every person, born or unborn, young or elderly, healthy or terminal, minority or majority.
Rather than turning humanity back towards God, as one would think the Holocaust would have done, the opposite happened.
The effect the Holocaust initiated by Hitler and the Nazis was the rise of Atheism.
For How could a Good God allow millions to die in concentration camps?
Rather than restoring the dignity of each individual human person, the effects of the Holocaust opened the door for the deaths of millions more faceless and nameless individuals through Abortion and Euthanasia, all in the name of preserving the “rights of the individual.”
So once again, the “rights” of some individuals are preserved at the expense of the “rights” of others.
Thus, the thinking and mentality of Hitler and the Nazis continue their influence upon humankind to this day.
Through numerous acts of legislation against Jews, Hitler not only made Anti-Semitism legal but also moral.
He was able to change the morality of a nation by making certain acts legal.
For many people believe that if something is legal, it must certainly be moral.
First, the Jews were stripped of their citizenship, then their businesses, then their property, then their legal rights.
Thus eventually turning them into cattle to be shipped off in train cars to camps where they were branded and put to death.
This is exactly how Hitler and the Nazis convinced a whole nation that Anti-Semitism was not only legal but also moral.
The response to this faceless and nameless genocide of millions of Jews in particular resulted
in the rise of Absolute Individualism after the war.
In its guilt-ridden quest to undo what Hitler did in the genocide of millions of people in the Holocaust, the world and the Western world in particular has created “Absolute Individualism” so that every, single individual has inalienable rights that no government can ever take away.
At first, this sounds logical and intelligent and necessary.
But in the process of safeguarding these Absolute Individual rights society has once again as Hitler did, taken away the rights of the Most Vulnerable.
Except for this time through Abortion and Euthanasia
These are now the ones who are a “threat” to society’s “pursuit of happiness” and the “rights of the individual.”
And society morally justifies all of this through legislation that makes it all “legal!”
And thus also moral.
If it is legal it must, therefore, be morally acceptable.
By passing laws supporting the termination of the most vulnerable, society itself begins to believe it is morally justified because these individuals are just, “tissue,” or “vegetables,” and no longer “valuable” or “human.”
One must first change the terminology if one wants to change the way of thinking.
The exact same method and argument was used by Hitler in the Holocaust.
The Holocaust can never be forgotten for it challenges humanity’s belief in the existence of God
AND…..the definition of what it means to be a human being made in the image and likeness of God.
Once we forget the link between God and humanity, as Hitler and the Nazis did, no Jew, no race, no creed, no culture is safe.
The life and death of Maximilian Kolbe is the ultimate Catholic response to the Holocaust and its continued effects today.
Rather than assert his own personal individual rights in Auschwitz, at the expense of another, Kolbe like Christ, preserved the rights of the individual by sacrificing himself precisely for another individual.
Rather than doubt the existence of God because of Auschwitz, Maximilian reaffirmed God by declaring that he was a Catholic priest as he went to the starvation bunker singing Psalms and hymns to God.
In Hitler’s mind only some human beings are valuable.
In the mind of God, ALL human beings are valuable,regardless of where they are in the spectrum of life and death, or where they are on the color chart, or what ethnicity they check off in the latest census, because God made each individual in His Own Image and Likeness!
Prayer : O Father and God of all, not only myself, but every person is made in your image and likeness and when I reject another, I reject you. Open my eyes to see you in the lives, the suffering, the colors, and the cultures, of every individual in the spectrum of life.
Questions and Meditations :
1. What does it mean to be human?
2. When does human life begin?
3. What is the difference between “legal” and “moral”?
4. How does society dehumanize the unborn and terminally ill?
5. How is a sin against a human being a sin against God?