Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Rajmund Kolbe was born on 8 January 1894 in Zduńska Wola, in central Poland, and was baptized the same day. Poland was then divided among Russia, Germany, and Austria, and his father, Juliusz, was a patriot who resented it. Juliusz and his wife, Marianna Dąbrowska, were devout Christians. Of their five children, only three survived: Franciszek, Rajmund, and Josef. The family soon moved to Pabianice, and money was short. At first only the eldest could go to school, and Rajmund picked up what he could from a priest and then from the town pharmacist.

As a boy, according to his own later account, he had an experience that shaped his life. At the age of nine, the Virgin Mary appeared to him holding two crowns, one white and one red, standing for purity and martyrdom. She asked whether he would accept either. He said he would take both.

In 1907 the Conventual Franciscans, who had settled in Lwów, offered to take the two elder Kolbe boys into their minor seminary. Their parents agreed, knowing that under Russian rule they could not give their sons the education and Christian formation they wanted for them. Rajmund entered the novitiate in 1910 and took the name Maximilian. His brother Franciszek eventually left the order for a military career, while Josef also became a Franciscan, as Father Alphonse.

Maximilian became a priest and devoted himself to spreading devotion to Mary Immaculate. He founded the Militia of the Immaculata, and although he suffered from tuberculosis, he published a periodical, The Knight of the Immaculata, whose circulation reached millions of copies within about ten years. He founded and directed the friary of Niepokalanów near Warsaw, ran an amateur radio station, and carried out missionary work in Europe and Asia.

In 1941 he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was given some of the most degrading work, including carrying corpses to the crematorium. There he offered his own life in place of Franciszek Gajowniczek, a fellow prisoner with a family. Kolbe died on 14 August 1941, reportedly speaking the words Ave Maria.

Pope Paul VI beatified him in 1971, and Pope John Paul II canonized him in 1982 as a martyr of charity, describing him as a patron for a difficult age. He is remembered for an act of self-giving that cost him his life, and he is honored as a patron of prisoners, journalists, amateur radio operators, families, and people struggling with addiction.

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us.