August 17, 2025

Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

by Fr. Jonah Teller, OP

Dear St. Joseph Parish Family,

Fr. Jonah here, filling in for Fr. Boniface while he’s away on retreat.

Earlier this week we celebrated the memorial of St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest of the Franciscan Order. In 1941 he was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Some months after his arrest, he volunteered to die in place of a fellow prisoner, a man who had a family. St. Maximilian was executed by lethal injection on August 14, 1941. He was canonized a saint by Pope St. John Paul II in 1982.

Three years after Kolbe’s death, another man, Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychologist, was brought to Auschwitz from another concentration camp (in total, Frankl would spend three years in four different camps). Frankl survived and wrote a book many of you may have read, Man’s Search for Meaning. He and St. Maximilian were not at Auschwitz at the same time, but Frankl’s words give us what I think is a window into the heart of the saint and martyr. Frankl writes:

Dostoevsky said once, "There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

Peace,
Fr. Jonah, O.P.