WWII: RC church renamed to honour martyr of Nazi camp

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NOT far from where I live there were once two churches standing opposite one another – one might say almost rival churches, for one was Anglican the other Catholic.

Furthermore, after the Second World War, considerable demographic changes took place in the area, leading in the end to the demise of the Anglican church and the Catholic church moving away to a new building.

The churches, gathered in the late 19th century at the junction of St Chad’s Road and Gordon Road, were C of E St Chad’s – after which the Road was named – and St Joseph’s, Derby’s third Catholic Church since the Reformation.

St Joseph’s was completed 15 years after H C Turner’s knobbly Early English St Chad’s, in 1897.

It was designed by James Hart in brick rather than stone, but with gritstone dressings and in the decorated style of Gothic rather than the more muscular Early English of St Chad’s.

Attached to the west end was an octagonal tower with a conical roof and, adjacent, was a presbytery in matching style and a schoolroom – a good handsome ensemble.

Inside, the decoration was modest, the Catholic community of Normanton being then less well off than the Anglican, but the simplicity suited the architecture.

By 1980, the congregation had decided on a move to a new site on sloping ground overlooking Burton Road, released by the council following the destruction of Temple House, a Regency villa which had latterly been a children’s home.

In the end a new, very modern church, built along the lines inspired by the liturgical revisions of Vatican II and designed by local architect Derek Montague, was completed in 1984, which left the old St Joe’s unwanted.

A solution was soon found, however, and it passed to Derby’s Polish community, well ensconced among us since their national privations in the Second World War and obliged to remain during the long Cold War that followed.

They rededicated the church to a man who had only been canonised two years before – St Maksymilian Kolbe, but whose name was already borne by their national parish in Derby.

So who was St Maksymilian Kolbe?

He was an extremely charismatic monk who was, in fact, born with the rather more prosaic name of Raymond Kolbe, on January 7, 1894, at Zdunska Wola, in Poland.

He was one of three sons of pious Catholic weaver Julius Kolbe and his wife, Marianne.

Poland was, at the time, still a province of the Russian empire and, unfortunately, Julius was in 1914 hanged by the Russian administration for sedition.

By that time, however, young Raymond had long been a man with a high Christian purpose, after having had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary some eight years earlier, following which he had vowed to dedicate himself to her cult.

He was educated at a seminary in Lvov, became a novice in 1911 and took his final vows shortly after his father’s death in 1914.

On entering the monastic life, he shed his first name in favour of Maksymilian.

There were two saints named Maximilian. One of them was an upper-crust Roman Christian from the province of Noricum (now in Austria) who founded a church at Lorch and was martyred in 284 in the reign of the Emperor Numerian.

Maksymilian Kolbe went on to study philosophy and theology in Rome and, after gaining his doctorate, with a group of friends, founded the Crusade of Mary, Immaculata, an anti-freemasonic missionary movement.

This took him on successful proselytising missions to Japan and India, despite recurrent lapses into illness. He also founded a publication to fight religious apathy called The Knight of the Immaculate, which turned out to be phenomenonally successful.

In 1927, a young admirer, Prince Drucki-Lubecki – ironically of a Russian family, descended from St Vladimir – gave him some land at Teresin, near Warsaw, on which he founded the monastery of Niepokalanow.

After the Nazi invasion in September 1939, the community housed 3,000 refugees, more than half of them Jews, and continued to publish a tide of publications, all overtly anti-Nazi.

Inevitably, the whole show was shut down by the occupiers and Kolbe was sent to prison in Warsaw February 17, 1941. Three months later, he was transferred to Auschwitz.

There he dedicated himself entirely to the relief of his fellow prisoners’ suffering, celebrated the sacraments with smuggled bread and wine and heard confessions.

After a break-out, camp rules dictated that one prisoner should be killed for every person who escaped. Kolbe offered himself in lieu of a married man with children and died a martyr’s death on August 14, 1941, by lethal injection after three weeks’ starvation.

He was canonised by John Paul II on October 10, 1982.

Although St Joseph’s was rededicated to St Maksymilian, the Polish Catholic parish dedicated to him was founded 58 years ago today, just over seven years after his death.

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