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brief · LWÓW, Austrian Galicia, September 5, 1911 AD

At seventeen, St. Maximilian Kolbe makes his vows at Lwów

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Saint Maximilian Kolbe
A faded black-and-white photograph of five young men in dark Franciscan habits with rosaries, three standing and two seated, posed in a courtyard before an arched doorway and potted plants; the seated man at center holds a small folded paper.
St. Maximilian Kolbe (seated, holding paper) with four fellow Polish clerics in a courtyard in Rome, 1914.

LWÓW, Austrian Galicia, September 5, 1911 AD — Saint Maximilian Kolbe, seventeen years old, made his vows at the Conventual Franciscan house here today — obedience, poverty and chastity — and promised to keep the Rule of St. Francis.

He is a shopkeeper’s son from Pabianice, some 500 km west of here in Russian Poland. Every friary and convent there was closed down in 1863. To reach this seminary he and his elder brother, Franciszek Kolbe, crossed the imperial frontier into Austrian Galicia dressed as farmers. He took the habit in the same house a year and a day ago, at sixteen, and became Brother Maximilian.

The year since has taught him the Franciscan common life of shared prayer, poverty and penance. During it he was troubled by scruples, and Fr Wenanty Katarzyniec, a Conventual Franciscan priest, helped him through them.

His superiors have already noticed something exceptional in him.

About this story

Catholic Saints News tells the lives of the saints as news from their own time and place. This story was written with AI from the historical record, and we read and approved it before it ran.

The Saints' words. This newspaper will never make a saint say something the historical record does not preserve.

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Image. Sw. Maksymilian jako kleryk w towarzystwie czterech klerykow-Polakow, photographer unknown, 1914, Archiwum Niepokalanowa (catalogue arch-01-0059) — see the original.

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A black-and-white group photograph of several dozen Conventual Franciscan friars in habits, seated and standing in rows under a vine-covered pergola, with a seated prelate in white choir dress at the center of the front row.
brief · LWÓW, Austrian Galicia, September 4, 1910 AD

At sixteen, St. Maximilian Kolbe takes the habit and a new name

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, a sixteen-year-old seminary student then named Rajmund, received the habit of the Franciscan Friars Minor Conventual at Lwów this week. He took the religious name Maximilian, a name he said had belonged to brave soldiers and to rulers. Earlier this year he had decided to leave the order for a soldier's life, and his mother's unannounced visit turned him back.

Edition of

Black-and-white studio portrait of a young man with short dark hair and round wire-rimmed glasses, wearing a dark high-collared habit against a pale background.

Six student friars and the priest who trains them joined a movement Saint Maximilian Kolbe founded for people who give themselves wholly to the Virgin Mary. They signed the membership book of the Militia of the Immaculata at the Franciscan friary in Kraków on the feast of the Holy Rosary, the first members outside Italy. St. Maximilian, twenty-five and newly home from Rome, is gravely ill with tuberculosis.

Edition of · 3 min read

Also in the edition of Saturday, 5 September 2026

The emperor Maximus, who holds the West from Trier, has put Priscillian, the bishop of Ávila, to death with two of his clerks, a layman and a woman named Euchrocia. They were tried not by bishops but by a civil judge the emperor put in charge of the case, and convicted of magic rather than heresy. Saint Martin of Tours had come to the city to argue that a church case did not belong before a secular court, and left with the emperor's promise that no blood would be shed.

4 min read