Why Was St. Kolbe Called 'Anti Semitic'?

In an article in Anglo Protestant newspaper The Irish Times in 1999, Geoffrey Wigoder referred to Saint Maximilian Kolbe as ‘the anti Semitic priest’.

An Israeli, he served as Vatican's Secretariat for Religious Dialogue with the Jewish People at the time of writing the article. In a shocking passage, Wigoder seems to have objected to not only the beatification of Kolbe (who was killed by the Nazis) but also the beatification of St. Edith Stein, who was also killed by the Nazis. He also repeated baseless insinuations about Pope Pius XII.

He wrote:

There have been glitches during this period and certain acts of the Pope - such as his reception of Arafat when a terrorist leader and of Waldheim, or his beatification of the anti-Semitic priest Maximilian Kolbe and of Edith Stein, the nun who died at Auschwitz for her Jewishness, as well as the proposed beatification of the controversial Pius XII - have been badly received in the Jewish community.

The accusations stemmed from 1982, the first charges were from Austrian periodical Wiener Tagebuch, a propaganda arm of the Austrian Communist Party (KPO).

Later, Washington Post writer Richard Cohen had criticised Pope John Paul II’s beatification of Kolbe, stating that the anti Semitism of Kolbe was ‘swept under the carpet’. Cohen actually blamed Kolbe for inciting the Holocaust (which Kolbe died in) and wrote:

it is not unfair to say that he and others like him provided a hospitable enviroment for it (the Holocaust). By propagating anti-Semitism, they set the stage for the unimaginable horror that was to follow.
In selecting Father Kolbe for sainthood, the church overlooked this

In a deranged article in 2006, Cohen raged at Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Auschwitz:

In religious terms, he is undoubtedly a saint -- but not to me. My saints are not bigots.

A writer who supported killing or expelling 82% of Iraq’s Christians in an illegal and criminal war, Christopher Hitchens, dismissed the heroism of Kolbe, writing that he was:

a rather ambivalent priest who . . . had apparently behaved nobly in Auschwitz

Hitchens, who helped to bring about a criminal war that led to an estimated one million deaths of innocent people in Iraq while he smoked cigars and drank wine, also wrote that Kolbe had been:

stoking the very oven in which he was to perish.

More recently, Hareetz marked Pope Francis’s visit to Auschwitz by stating:

The Catholic Church canonised him, turning him into a martyr nearly 35 years ago. It ignored the fact that he was actually an anti Semite who believed in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and that he justified the expulsion of Jews from Poland’s economy.

The article then made insinuations about Pope Pius XII and the Vatican Archives, which have since been proven to be false with the opening of the records of the much slandered pope.

Jedrzej Giertych, who wrote a book called ‘The Libel against a Saint’, stated that even most Jews in the 1920s thought that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was authentic, nonetheless, it only makes up a couple of lines in his vast bibliography.

The New York Times reported that the opposition to Kolbe’s beatification was coming mainly from British and American sources. The New York Times article on the matter actually defended Kolbe, writing:

In 1934 his colleagues in Poland sent him a sample issue of the newspaper. Father Kolbe wrote back to them about an article that demanded the elimination of Jews from Polish economic life. The letter said:
''It would be better not to speak so much about the necessity of a systematic removal of Jews, but rather to contribute to the multiplication of Polish businesses, which would lead more speedily to the goal.''
The next year he wrote to the editors: ''I would pay great attention not to stimulate hatred against Jews or to deepen it among readers, who are already hostile to them. Our highest goal must always be the conversion and sanctification of souls.'' Conversion Was the Goal

Nonetheless, Kolbe was not without Jewish defenders.

The St. Louis Centre for Holocaust Studies wrote:

his image of the Jews, as of all who did not share his faith, was of people who were prisoners of error, not objects of hatred.

Where did this controversy come from?

Kolbe had written thousands of letters, books and articles over a number of decades, many of them as part of his Militia Immaculata initiative, with his print editions of The Knight of the Immaculate and the Little Daily reaching large numbers of people. Despite the tens of thousands of pages from these 10,000 plus documents, only 31 mentioned Judaism, and they were mostly in relation to Masonry and Communism, of which he said he wished, ‘to seek the conversion of sinners, heretics, schismatics, Jews, etc., and especially, Masons’. There was of course the well known story from 1917, where a young Kolbe had seen Masons marching in Rome showing St. Michael being trounced by Lucifer and threatening to make the pope their slave.

Eugene Fisher, executive secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Catholic-Jewish Relations in the early 1980s had written that Kolbe had kept some 2,000 Jewish refugees in his monastery, evidence that his issue was more to do with spirituality than with race or whatever has been insinuated by the likes of pro Iraq War Christopher Hitchens.

Kolbe, by an objective measure was an incredibly noble and brave man, who gave up his life so that a man with children would live instead.

His Polish background and opposition to Freemasonry and to Communism was in an environment that was very different to that which was to be found after World War II.

In his own words, he articulated it best: