Concilium - Ireland

August Allocutio 2025

21 August 2025

Frank Duff and Maximilian Kolbe

Fr. Paul Churchill, Concilium Spiritual Director

In a previous August allocutio I commented that the month of August is studded with feasts of saints who have a special relationship with Our Lady. And one of the jewels of our August calendar is St. Maximilian Kolbe. He had a special devotion to Our Lady and he was inspired in 1917 to set up an army of the Immaculate One to help combat modern ideas which rejected the faith. Just four years later Frank Duff set up the Legion of Mary.

The similarity of their devotion to Our Lady, their seeing Our Lady as the spouse of Holy Spirit, their taking inspiration from Louis Marie de Montfort, their view that Mary has a central role in the working of redemption, have been commented on by many. Yet we have no proof they knew each other or had ever communicated. The fact that they both used the image of an army for their organization may have been inspired by the great armies that fought each other in World War I. But let us look closer.

For Frank the idea of Mary was in the mind of God from the start. And as I have said before it was from this idea of her who would be the entry point of God into his creation that all Creation was planned. But let us listen to Maximilian Kolbe: “Among the innumerable possible beings that could express his differing perfections, God, from all eternity, saw one endowed with perfect form, immaculate, with no slightest taint of sin, a creature who would reflect his own divine qualities in the most perfect degree possible for a created nature …”

Frank, as I have said before, sees in Mary the greatest expression in human form of what the Holy Spirit is. Kolbe is strikingly similar: “The Holy Spirit dwells in the Immaculata, lives in her and does so from the first instance of her existence and henceforth forever.” He makes a distinction between Mary, the human Immaculate Conception and the Holy Spirit whom he calls, “the eternal and uncreated Immaculate Conception”. Fr Kolbe’s ideas are just sketches, undeveloped.

Frank Duff adds a dimension that Kolbe had not developed. For Frank Mary is not just a passive recipient of the eternal word. She in fact works with the Holy Spirit as a real conscious co-operator. Together they bring forth the eternal Word. Mary, out of her free will agrees on behalf of Creation to receive the Saviour. God asks, all depends on her decision. We have that famous sermon of St. Bernard (read on Dec 20th in the Office of Readings) in which he urges her to say yes, expressing all of creation’s groaning for the revealing of the sons of God (Rm 8).

Kolbe and Frank agree that Mary is not the Holy Spirit incarnate; they are two different persons unlike Jesus who is the second person of the Blessed Trinity expressed in two natures. But Frank sees Mary as the greatest expression in human form of the Holy Spirit.

Maximilian Kolbe and Frank Duff, as with de Montfort are clear: Mary is a creature. “Our Lady is also a creature made by God. In this sense and of herself, she is nothing” (Kolbe). “We believe that he is God and she is a creature and that infinity yawns between them” (Duff).

Both also hold the view that because Mary is so close to the Holy Spirit that she is the intermediatory of grace. Kolbe in a letter once said that “The union between the Immaculata and the Holy Spirit is so inexpressible, yet so perfect, that the Holy Spirit acts only by the Most Holy Virgin, his spouse”. For Frank, the agency of the Holy Spirit is Mary.

Let me end with a quote from Fr. Frank Peffley’s dealing with this subject. “Upon examining many of the writings of Frank Duff and Maximilian Kolbe we have found their teaching to be almost identical. … However, their most striking similarities come to the fore when they deal with Our Lady’s relationship with the Holy Spirit. They hold that the third Divine Person has united himself to Mary, a human person, without the latter becoming divine. Mary is so close to the Holy Spirit that she can be said to be the His living human portrait”. Fr. Peffley calls them twin brothers, twin sons of Mary in the twentieth century.

Perhaps we should see in Maximilian Kolbe the martyr saint of the Legion given his closeness to Frank and de Montfort in his thinking, but not least his complete confidence in Our Lady. It is she who, early in his life, offered him as a choice the crowns of purity and martyrdom, to which he said, like the little boy being offered two cakes to choose from, “I’ll take both!”. St Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us. Amen.