By Ana Rodriguez Soto - Florida Catholic newspaper
Photographer: ANA RODRIGUEZ-SOTO | FC
Having lunch at one of the cafeterias in Jasna Gora: Father Jeff McCormick, pastor of St. Maximilian Kolbe in Pembroke Pines (far right). He traveled to World Youth Day with a group of nine teens and five young adults. From left, the adult chaperones, members of the parish's LifeTeen board: Rodolfo and Susan Gonzalez-Llanos and Scot Campbell (his wife Sue is hidden from view.)
CZESTOCHOWA | It’s one thing to be pastor of a parish named after a very recent saint. It’s something else entirely to visit that saint’s cell and spend a moment in prayer.
That’s exactly Father Jeff McCormick’s experience this World Youth Day. The pastor of St. Maximilian Kolbe Parish in Pembroke Pines traveled to Krakow with a group of nine teens and five young adults, plus adult members of his LifeTeen board.
The St. Max contingent were not part of the official archdiocesan pilgrimage group but instead joined a LifeTeen group of 273 from parishes across the U.S. They ran into the Miami contingent while having lunch on the grounds of Jasna Gora, the monastery that houses the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa.
Photographer: ANA RODRIGUEZ-SOTO | FC
Father Jeff McCormick, pastor of St. Maximilian Kolbe Parish in Pembroke Pines, takes part in the Mass celebrated by Archbishop Thomas Wenski in the chapel of Our Lady of Czestochowa.
Father McCormick recounted how he and his group had visited Niepokalonow, the monastery founded by St. Maximilian Kolbe in 1927, and located about 20 miles outside of Warsaw. While there, he was granted a special privilege.
“I got to go in there,” to St. Maximilian’s cell, and sit at his desk, the priest recalled. “Oh my gosh, it was so moving. Very, very moving.”
He also was able to touch a first-class relic of the martyr-priest, who died at Auschwitz after offering his life in exchange for that of another prisoner, a husband and father.
“His barber kept the beard fragments because he knew there was something special about him,” Father McCormick said of the relic.
He noted that St. Maximilian Kolbe also hid nearly 2,000 Jews at the monastery during the Second World War — part of the reason the Nazis sent him to Auschwitz. He and his Franciscan monks also published a magazine denouncing both the Nazis and religious apathy.
St. Maximilian Kolbe also spearheaded the building of another Franciscan monastery in Nagasaki, Japan, when he served there as a missionary. Father McCormick noted that many at the time questioned whether that was a good idea.
“When the (atomic) bomb hit, the monastery was the only thing in Nagasaki to survive,” he said.
On Aug. 14, at 11 a.m., the Pembroke Pines parish plans to mark the 75th anniversary of St. Maximilian’s death with a Mass celebrated by Auxiliary Bishop Peter Baldacchino.
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