continuation...

The Mariology of St. Maximilian M. Kolbe
by Fr. James McCurry, O.F.M. Conv.

Mary's disclosure of her name to Bernadette at Lourdes was seen by Kolbe as a type of "identity statement" akin to Yahweh's self-disclosure on Horeb: At Lourdes the Immaculare Virgin replied to St. Bernadette who asked her who she was, by saying " I am the Immaculate Conception." By these luminous words she tells us not only that she was immaculate in her conception, but beyond this that she is the Immaculate Conception as such. Something white is one thing; the whiteness of a thing is something else. When God said to Moses "I am the One who is, " God was telling him: "What is proper to my essence is that I should always be, by my very nature, of myself, with no other principle of being." The Immaculate Virgin, of course, was created by God; she is a creature; she is a conception; still, she is the Immaculaate Conception! What depths of mystery lie hidden in those words.

In Kolbe's view, then, the mystery of the Immaculate Conception is the mystery of a person. All of his theological speculations derive from this insight and attempt to unravel the layers of personal relationships with God and with creatures-that the person of the Immaculate has.

On the level of the Immaculate's personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, Kolbe's fertile mind was at work almost until the very hour of his final arrest by the Nazis on the 17th of February 1941. Early that morning he arose, summoned his secretary, and began dictating a new theological insight that appears only this one time in the whole corpus of his writings: the identification of the Holy Spirit as "uncreated Immaculate Conception" uniquely bonded to Mary as "created Immaculate Conception." Kolbe's insight here stakes out new territory in delineating the intimate nature of the union between Mary and the Holy Spirit. First note his description of the Holy Spirit:

And who is the Holy Spirit? the flowering of the love of the Father and the Son. If the fruit of created love is a created conception, then the fruit of divine Love, that prototype of all created love, is necessarily a divine conception. The Holy Spirit is, therefore, the "uncreated, eternal conception," the prototype of all conceptions that multiply life throughout the whole universe.

Next note how his description of Mary Immaculate is totally bound up in this image of the Holy Spirit as "uncreated conception":

...United to the Holy Spirit as his spouse, she [the Immaculate] is one with God in an incomparably more perfect way than can be predicated of any other creature.

What sort of union is this? It is above all an interior union, a union of her essence with the "essence of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells in her, lives in her. this was true from the first instant of her existence. It was always true; it will always be true.

In what does this life of the Spirit in Mary consist? He himself is uncreated Love in her; the Love of the Father and of the Son, the Love by which God loves himself, the very love of the Most Holy trinity. He is a fruitful Love, a "Conception." Among creatures made in God's image the union brought about through married love is the most intimate of all (cf. Mt. 19,6). In a much more precise, more interior, more essential manner, the Holy Spirit lives in the soul of the Immaculata, in the very depths of her being. He makes her fruitful, from the very first instant of her existence, all during her life, and for all eternity.

This eternal "Immaculate Conception" (which is the Holy Spirit) produces in an immaculate manner divine life itself in the womb (or depths) of Mary's soul, making her the Immacualte Conception, the human Immacualte Conception...

If among human beings the wife takes the name of her husband because she belongs to him, is one with him, becomes equal to him and is , with him, the source of new life, with how much greater reason should the name of the Holy Spirit, who is the Divine Immaculate Conception, be used as the name of her in whom he lives as uncreated Love, the principle of life in the whole supernatural order of grace?