Kolbe’s Secret to the Best Month of Mary You’ve Ever Lived

May is the Month of the Blessed Mother Mary. Traditionally, people devoted a special care to do something special for their Blessed mother each day of May. I want to inspire you with “more” you can do and why. Best yet, I want to give you a story of St. Maximillian Kolbe’s secret, and how you can transform your May this year into the best May of your life yet! But first, let’s set the stage…

In 1922, just a couple years after being ordained, St. Maximillian Kolbe began publishing “Knight of the Immaculate” in Polish. Only a few years later, the desire to read his magazine was so widespread that it was being translated into many other languages. One of the surprising things was that the Japanese loved it.

Within a few years, The Knights of the Immaculate were sending newsletter magazine worldwide, producing content on the radio, and even broadcasting television. It wasn’t even 1930 yet! There wasn’t internet. There wasn’t large media conglomerates, there was a young priest devoted to Mary.

Unable to do enough for the Blessed Mother, people flocked to Maximillian to help. Then, a mere five years after he started, in 1927, he was building a “Town of the Immaculate” outside Warsaw, Poland on land donated to him by a wealthy nobleman. The town grew and the interest among the Japanese was so strong that many came to Poland to train with Maximillian.

In 1930, Japanese trained in Poland with St. Maximillian set up their own “Town of the Immaculate” in Japan…  In Nagasaki, Japan. Many speculate that the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II deliberately targeted this Catholic renaissance. Whether that is true, we know that the bomb obliterated this town. Worse, it seems that the Arians (Nazis) destroyed that in Poland. We have a chance to do even more today.

Imagine that. You have so much more at your disposal today. Each of us can immediately reach thousands and thousands of people by merely publishing a blog posts, much like this one that you are reading. What was the secret to Kolbe’s devotion to Mary? What did he tell us to do so we can be just like him?

A short diversion…

May is the Month of Mary. We live in times far past the prediction of Fatima that Russia would spread her errors throughout the world. We’ve seen that among those errors are occult gnosticism and masonry, as the Russians themselves identified. Kolbe did not have the advantage of time to think of these things. Rather, he seemed to understand the enemies afoot right away. Mother Church did, too, and the evidence rests both in the feast days that begin May and a cover of Knight of the Immaculate.

St. Joseph the Worker and St. Athanasius are the feasts of May 1 and 2. St. Joseph the Worker is also known as the “Terror of Demons” and your’s truly has fleshed out the Masonic socialist connections to that day before. St. Athanasius fought Arius. Arius was the heresiarch of Arianism. Arianism is a breed of occult gnosticism. With that in hand, consider that May 1 and May 2 are feasts commemorating the chief heroes battling these two things:  masonry and occult heresies. Now check out the cover of Kolbe’s  first issue of Knights of the Immaculate magazine from 1922:

The banner above the Blessed Mother, “Rycerz Niepokalanej” means “Knight of the Immaculate”. Mary is seen crushing the serpent and the crescent moon — a tip in Marian imagery to the crushing of the lunar cults. Beneath Mary is the slogan:  “wszystkie herezje samaś zniszczyla na całym świecie ona zetrze glowę twoję.”  I had to enlist a native Polish speaker to help me with the word “samaś” and the translation is:  “You have yourself destroyed all heresies in the whole world. She will crush your head”.

Whoa. Mary has two swords, one crushing heresy, and the other Masonic socialism/freemasonry. Just like our feast days. Just like the warnings of Fatima. Fr. Geiger of Mary Victrix has written before on this cover image and resolved it to a quote by Kolbe on the truth as the immutable foundation of happiness. As much as I like that because I love Kolbe’s expansion of reality, I think we can see, because this is a publication that he was just beginning, that this truly was his battle cry. Kolbe, as we have published here so many times, and one of my favorite quotes is that “No one in the world can change truth.”  Amen.

You’ve seen this image from us before. I am fond of it for having made it, but it is one expression of Kolbe’s essence.

The other essence, not shown in my favorite image to the left, is his devotion to Mary. Fortunately, he gave us a blueprint of how we can be like him. Thank God. Fr. Hardon explains it even more succinctly.

As Fr. Hardon used to say in order to explain grace:  “grace is the money of Heaven.”  It is the essence of eternal life, a gift of God.

Where do we get it?

Fr. Hardon, explaining Kolbe, starts with this very point:  “In other words, our spiritual life depends on grace. That’s obvious, but it also depends on the grace that we must receive through Mary… the Blessed Virgin Mary is the Mediatrix of all the graces that any human being receives, believer or unbeliever, Christian or non-Christian, without exception.”  If you want a spiritual life, if you want the means of Heaven, then you can only get that from Mary. Period. She is the wellhead of grace that Jesus gave us.

I want to caution for a moment on the title “Mediatrix of all grace.”  I know that many “movements” have floated around about that title. I’m only going to use the term as St. Kolbe and Fr. Hardon used it. So, do not import anybody else’s explanation. As I use the term, and as I understand Fr. Hardon and St. Maximillian Kolbe, I describe it this way:  if you are in this world and you have grace, you got it from Mary. And I will add:  and nowhere else. Period.

Jesus meant this when he gave us Mary from the Cross as our Mother. She is not God. Nor, as the Arians would have supposed, did she gain divinity by her own means. She is the means of grace, which comes from God, but it only comes to us through Mary. That’s not the secret, yet.

One more thing that St. Louis deMontfort and St. Maximillian would tell us because this distinction is so important:  we do not go to Mary and then to God. Rather, we go with Mary to God. Mary accompanies us to God. She brings us to Him. This distinction is a stumbling block so many have over Marian devotion because they think devotion to Mary is worship at odds with God. It cannot be when she brings us, with her, to God.

If you want to be holy, then you need grace, and you can only get that in this world from Mary. That’s our foundation of truth. That’s the basis of St. Kolbe’s secret.

Now, for the secret itself:  consecration to Mary. St. Louis de Montfort advocated a mission and 30 days of preparation to do this. I did his preparation decades ago and I thank God. But, let’s get serious here. St. Maximillian said that ACT itself is what is necessary. You making an act with your will is all it takes. Fr. Hardon reported that St. Kolbe preferred this form of making that act. Said Fr. Hardon:

“We can consecrate ourselves to the Immaculate one in various ways, and express our consecration in different words or different forms. In fact, a simple act of the will would be enough for that really is the essence of such a Marian consecration.” However, [Kolbe] did provide one formula as follows:

My Immaculate Queen of heaven and earth, refuge of sinners and Mother most loving;  you to whom God entrusted the entire order of mercy. I am an unworthy sinner. I cast myself at your feet, humbly pleading that you ordain to accept me completely and totally as your property and possession and do with me, and all my powers of body and soul, and with all my life and death and eternity, whatever is pleasing to you.

Start there. Tell your Blessed Mother that you mean that. Place yourself at her disposal and care. She’s your Mother. She will not only give you grace, but teach you to be like her, a channel of grace. That is, by definition, holiness. You want to be holy right?

Now for the power punch. St. Kolbe was wise in seeing that the inward act needs an outward sign. Here’s what he suggested:

For St. Maximillian Kolbe, the outward sign of consecration to Mary was to wear, or at least carry, the Miraculous Medal. He explained, this is not absolutely essential, but then he added, “it is the integral sign and condition for our consecration.”

Brother Francis M. Kalvelage, FI., editing the book Kolbe: Saint of the Immaculate, says of the same:  “Maximilian’s secret weapon…is a medal of Mary that is really no secret. It just seems though it is, as it isn’t being used and propagated as St. Maximilian would have us use it in bringing souls to Christ.”

I call it a secret because even I forgot. I have in my hand a miraculous medal blessed by Fr. Hardon when he told me this in 1999. Seems like I’ve forgotten myself for years. When thinking about that, I was moved to remind you and tell some of you that may have never heard this!

Do you want holiness? Do you want to be a channel of grace by which God can convert sinners? Good.   Said Fr. Hardon, “The most effective means of conversion is through Mary. St. Kolbe’s great hope was that the missionary evangelization and conversion apostolate of the Catholic Church into the future would be placed into the hands of Mary.”

Here’s the marching orders from St. Kolbe (from Saint of the Immaculate):

“In Kolbe’s mind the Medals were even more than a great aid in bringing about conversions. Besides being a proof of the unwavering trust in Our Lady’s powerful role in bringing about a change of heart, members of the Militia were to wear the Medal as a sign of their total consecration to Mary, and to recite daily the invocation circling the image of the Immaculate on the medal, ‘Oh Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.’  To the last sentence he added, ‘especially the Masons and the enemies of the Church.'”

“The [M]edal honors Mary in her great prerogative of the Immaculate Conception, and also depicts Mary as the Mediatrix of all graces… On the opposite side we are reminded by the two Hearts, the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, that the whole purpose of the Militia Immaculatae which…is to establish, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the reign of the Sacred Heart of Jesus throughout the whole world in every soul living and to the end of time- and that ‘as soon as possible, as soon as possible!'”

What are you waiting for? Make that consecration above. Do it today. You can always do De Montfort later. They are not exclusive of each other — you can do both. It’s more important that you make a choice to consecrate yourself to our Blessed Mother. Then, get a miraculous medal. Get several. Ask Mary how she’d like you to use them. She’ll help you.

St. Kolbe predicted that in our age, year 2000, “only a fraction of the human race would even be nominally Christian.”  Mary and your consecration to her is the answer today. Make May the month you do it. Make yourself one of the flowers in her bouquet for May crowning. She will bring you to her Son, Jesus. Do it!

Mary, Queen of Apostles, Pray for us!

This article, Kolbe’s Secret to the Best Month of Mary You’ve Ever Lived is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
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