The Immaculata, the New Eve

For Maximilian, Mary is not only the creature whom God chose as His Mother to enter into the world: she is the Immaculata, the new Woman, the redeemed humanity dreamed of by God.

She is, even today, the Mother of God who became man, called to continue to work with the Holy Spirit in generating the Son in the hearts of men.

“... And the Word was made flesh (Jn 1:14) as the result of the love of God and the Immaculata. So He became the firstborn, the Man-God, and souls are not reborn in Christ by any other way, other than through the love of God and toward the Immaculata and in the Immaculata.”

He realised that, both in the mission of the Son—that of revealing the face of the Father and making us share in His divine Sonship, as in that of the Spirit—that of forming in the image of Jesus all the children of God, God the Father has entrusted to Mary a very specific mission: to be the Mother of the Son of God made man and the Mother of all men called to be members of His Mystical Body, the Church.

Maximilian wrote: “...it is the task of the Holy Spirit to form until the end of the world the new members of the Mystical Body of Christ, but… this work is accomplished with Mary, in Mary and through Mary”; “In Mary’s womb the soul must be reborn according to Jesus Christ’s pattern.”

From the prolonged and vital contemplation of the dynamics of this plan of love, first as a young student in Rome and then increasingly in the years of his Franciscan religious life and of his priestly ministry, Maximilian deepened that passion for the glory of God, the coming of the Kingdom of the Heart of Jesus, and the conversion and sanctification of every person – all of which would become the driving force of his whole existence.

In his desire to attract all men to God’s love, Maximilian Kolbe understood that the first fundamental priority of the Church’s mission is to imitate the Lord Jesus, the Missionary of the Father par excellence, to do as He did, that is, emptying ourselves in the womb of the same mother, Mary.

Therefore, Fr. Maximilian, going straight to the essence of things, realized that the strength of the mission consists in belonging totally to Mary, in striving to be like her, to become her (cf. KW 508 and 1210), to allow her divine Spouse, the Holy Spirit, the main Protagonist of mission, to continue to bring Christ into the world through us.

This Marian perspective was echoed in the recent ecclesial Magisterium, in the thought of Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI who wrote as follows: “The Church is not an apparatus; she is not simply an institution... She is a woman. She is a mother. She is alive. The Marian understanding of the Church is the most decisive antithesis to a merely organizational and bureaucratic concept of Church. We cannot make the Church; we have to be the Church…. It is only in being Marian that we become Church. In the beginning, the Church... was born when the ‘fiat’ emerged from the soul of Mary. This is the deepest desire of the Council: that the Church is awakened in our souls. Mary shows us the way.”

Closing Prayer

Hail Mary… 

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you, and for all those who do not have recourse to you, especially the enemies of Holy Church and all those recommended to you.

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