Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe

Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe was a Polish Conventual Franciscan, a priest and martyr, and the founder of the Militia of the Immaculata and of Niepokalanów. In the German camp of Auschwitz he gave his life for a fellow prisoner, the father of a family. The Church celebrates his memorial on August 14, the anniversary of his death.

He was born on January 8, 1894, in Zduńska Wola and was baptized the same day with the name Raymond. According to his mother’s account, he told her that as a boy he had seen the Mother of God holding two crowns, a white one signifying purity and a red one signifying martyrdom, and that he had accepted both. In 1907 he entered the seminary of the Conventual Franciscans in Lviv, and in 1910 he began his novitiate and received the name Maximilian.

From 1912 to 1919 he studied in Rome and earned doctorates in philosophy and theology. At his solemn profession in 1914 he added the name Mary to his own. In 1917, while still a student friar, he founded with a few confreres the Militia of the Immaculata, an association of the faithful who consecrate themselves to the Immaculata. In 1918 he was ordained a priest.

In 1919 he returned to Poland. He suffered from tuberculosis and was treated in Zakopane. In 1922 he began publishing the monthly “Rycerz Niepokalanej” (The Knight of the Immaculata), which for several years was produced at the friary in Grodno. In 1927 he founded Niepokalanów near Warsaw, a friary joined to a large publishing house; in 1938 the circulation of the “Knight” reached one million copies. In 1930 he left for Japan and founded a similar friary in Nagasaki, Mugenzai no Sono, the Garden of the Immaculata. In 1936 he returned to lead Niepokalanów again.

After the outbreak of the Second World War the Germans arrested him together with his confreres on September 19, 1939, and held him prisoner for three months. Released in December, he returned to Niepokalanów, which took in refugees, among them many Jews. On February 17, 1941, he was arrested again and held in the Pawiak prison, and on May 28 he was deported to Auschwitz, where he received the number 16670. At the end of July 1941, after a prisoner escaped, ten men were chosen to die of starvation. When one of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out in despair for his wife and children, Father Maximilian offered to take his place. In the starvation bunker he prayed with the condemned and kept up their spirits. On August 14, 1941, the eve of the Assumption, he was killed with an injection of phenol, and his body was burned.

Paul VI, who called him a martyr of love, beatified him on October 17, 1971. John Paul II, who recalled at Auschwitz in 1979 that he had gone down many times to his death cell, canonized him on October 10, 1982, in Saint Peter’s Square and decreed that he be venerated also as a martyr. Franciszek Gajowniczek was present at the ceremony. Benedict XVI recalled the words attributed to the saint, that hatred is not a creative force and that only love is creative.