St. Maximilian Kolbe

St. Maximilian Kolbe was born Rajmund Kolbe on January 8, 1894, in Zduńska Wola, Poland. He later recounted a childhood vision in which the Blessed Virgin offered him two crowns, one white for purity and one red for martyrdom, and he chose both. He entered the Conventual Franciscans, taking the name Maximilian (adding Mary at his final vows), studied in Rome, and was ordained a priest in 1918, earning doctorates in philosophy and theology. While still a seminarian in Rome in 1917, he founded the Militia Immaculatae, a movement of total consecration to Mary Immaculate for the conversion of souls. Back in Poland, despite chronic tuberculosis, he built a remarkable apostolate of the press: his magazine Rycerz Niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculata) reached a circulation in the hundreds of thousands, and in 1927 he founded Niepokalanów, the 'City of the Immaculata,' a friary near Warsaw that grew into one of the largest religious communities in the world. From 1930 to 1936 he served as a missionary in Japan, founding a monastery and Marian magazine on the outskirts of Nagasaki. After the German invasion of Poland, Niepokalanów under his leadership sheltered thousands of refugees, among them some two thousand Jews. Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1941 and deported to Auschwitz in May, where he was registered as prisoner 16670. In late July 1941, after an escape from the camp, ten men were chosen to die by starvation in reprisal. When one of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out for his wife and children, Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place. He led his companions in prayer through two weeks in the starvation bunker and, still alive on August 14, 1941, was killed by an injection of carbolic acid. Paul VI beatified him in 1971, and on October 10, 1982, Pope John Paul II canonized him as a martyr of charity, with Gajowniczek present in St. Peter's Square. His feast is August 14, and he is venerated as a patron of prisoners, families, journalists, and the pro-life movement. Pilgrims honor him at Niepokalanów and in the starvation cell at Auschwitz, enduring witnesses to his own words that hatred is conquered only by love.