The Story of Maximilian Kolbe, ‘Patron Saint of Our Difficult Century’

We have a tendency to throw around the word ‘hero’. In doing so we make the term something of a banality. We speak, for instance, of the ‘heroic effort’ of the sportsman, and say of someone who has once drew criticism and now draws praise that she has gone from ‘zero to hero’. Words change in meaning with use, but the word ‘hero’ is perhaps one we should take care of. In using it so freely we risk inflating the currency, if I can put it that way: consider the way in which the word ‘surreal’, once denoting that an object possessed the qualities of surrealism, is now used to mean merely ‘odd’ or ‘unusual’. A beautiful and useful word has now become a commonplace.

The word ‘hero’ has a rather more exact meaning than perhaps we realise. In his book Altruism, the scientist and monk Matthieu Ricard points out that heroism implies the voluntary acceptance of a degree of danger or sacrifice that goes well beyond what is usually expected of people. He adds that the word therefore carries different meanings depending on context. The daily acts of a soldier at war might be deemed heroic if a civilian were to perform them.

Stories of heroism abound at wartime. This is perhaps because the individual is so easily subsumed into the group, or because war gives the hero many chances to be one. The extraordinary…