St. Maximilian Kolbe

Maximilian Kolbe was born Raymond Kolbe on January 8, 1894, in Zdunska Wola, a small town in Russian-partitioned Poland. He was the second of four sons of Julius Kolbe, an ethnic German weaver, and Maria Dabrowska, a Polish shoemaker's daughter. His childhood was marked by a striking mystical experience: his mother later reported that as an infant he had a vision of the Virgin Mary, who offered him two crowns, one white (for purity) and one red (for martyrdom), and that he accepted both. The family moved frequently across partitioned Poland, and young Raymond attended schools in several cities before joining the Conventual Franciscans in 1907, taking the name Maximilian Maria.

Kolbe was ordained a priest in Rome in 1918, having studied philosophy and theology at the Pontifical Roman Seminary and the Pontifical University of St. Bonaventure, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy. Already during his student years he had co-founded the Militia Immaculata (Army of Mary), a lay movement dedicated to the consecration of souls to the Blessed Virgin Mary, total consecration to Christ through Mary, and the conversion of enemies of the Church. After returning to Poland, he established a thriving Catholic publishing apostolate, founding the magazine Rycerz Niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculata) in 1922 and, with the help of a small fraternity of friars, the massive Franciscan monastery and printing complex at Niepokalanow, about 30 miles west of Warsaw. At its peak in the late 1930s Niepokalanow housed roughly 800 men, including hundreds of lay brothers, and was reportedly the largest Catholic publishing house in the world, producing magazines, tracts, and a daily newspaper.

Kolbe also launched a Japanese mission in 1930, spending several years in Nagasaki and founding another branch of his publishing apostolate there, complete with a seminary for Japanese Franciscans. Returning to Poland, he took charge of Niepokalanow again in 1936 and continued to expand his media work, including a Catholic radio station. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the monks of Niepokalanow sheltered roughly 2,000 Polish refugees on their property, and Kolbe himself was arrested briefly by German soldiers. He was released but continued to speak against the occupation. In February 1941 he was arrested again, this time sent first to Pawiak prison in Warsaw and then, on May 28, 1941, to the Auschwitz concentration camp under the prisoner number 16670.

Three months after his arrival at Auschwitz, in late July 1941, a prisoner escaped from his block. As collective punishment, the camp commandant ordered that ten men from the block be selected to die by starvation in an underground bunker. One of those chosen, Franciszek Gajowniczek, a Polish army sergeant and father of two, cried out in desperation for his family. Kolbe stepped forward from the ranks and volunteered to take his place. According to witnesses, when the commandant asked who he was, Kolbe replied, 'I am a Catholic priest; let me take his place.' The ten men were locked in the starvation cell and deprived of food and water. After two weeks, only Kolbe and three others were still alive; they were then killed by injection of carbolic acid on August 14, 1941, the vigil of the Assumption.

Pope Paul VI recognized Kolbe as a confessor of the faith in 1971, and beatified him that same year. Pope John Paul II canonized him on October 10, 1982, as a 'martyr of charity,' the first time that title had been used in a canonization ceremony. Gajowniczek, the man whose life Kolbe had saved, survived the war and was present at both the 1971 beatification and the 1982 canonization. Kolbe's remains are housed at the Basilica of the Immaculate Mother in Niepokalanow, where his feast day is celebrated on August 14. He is also remembered in the chapel of the Ten Martyrs of Auschwitz.