Seven Kraków friars join St. Maximilian Kolbe's movement for the Virgin Mary

KRAKÓW, Poland, October 7, 1919 AD — Seven friars at the Franciscan friary in Kraków joined the Militia of the Immaculata this evening, the first group to join it anywhere outside Italy. Six of them are friars studying for the priesthood; the seventh is the priest who trains them. The Militia’s founder, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, is twenty-five, and his physicians have given him three months to live at the most.

The Militia asks each member to give himself wholly to the Virgin Mary, whom it calls the Immaculata. St. Maximilian wanted the friars he lived with at Kraków to make that offering. His fellow friars ignored his efforts to start the Militia among them, opposed it or laughed at it, and he found that harder to bear than his illness. In April, in a letter from Rome to his younger brother Józef, a fellow Franciscan, he had named what he believed he was fighting: “a very serious epidemic of indifference.”

In 1917 AD, while St. Maximilian was still a student friar in Rome, processions marking two hundred years of Freemasonry carried banners through the city. One banner read: “Satan will reign in the Vatican and the Pope will be his servant.” On October 16, 1917 AD, before he was ordained, he and six other friars formed the Militia. The charter he wrote for it set the aim of converting everyone living in sin, heresy or schism, and the Freemasons above all. Pope Benedict XV blessed it on March 28 of this year.

In July St. Maximilian took his second doctorate, in theology, and came home to a Poland suffering poverty and famine. He moved into the friary attached to the church of St. Francis of Assisi in Kraków and began teaching philosophy to the student friars and Church history in the major seminary. Then the tuberculosis he had brought from Rome was found to be far advanced. One lung had collapsed and the other was damaged. His superiors took him off teaching and left him to hear confessions and preach a few sermons.

A friar who wrote his name in the book that evening took on three conditions set by St. Maximilian’s charter. The first was the offering, in the charter’s words: to “make a voluntary and total oblation of oneself to the B.V.M. Immaculate as an instrument in her most holy hands.” The second was to carry or wear the Miraculous Medal. The third was to have his name written in the Militia’s register, at Rome or at a centre attached to it. Every member is asked to pray once a day, if possible, in the words the charter gives: “O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you, and for all who do not have recourse to you especially for the Freemasons.”

It was the feast of the Holy Rosary, and during recreation that evening the friars wrote their names in the book that was to be the Militia’s register of members at Kraków. The six who signed were students for the priesthood in the same house where the Militia had been laughed at. Their master, Father Keller, the priest responsible for their training, signed with them.

From that evening the Militia grew, though not everyone welcomed it. Some people misunderstood St. Maximilian’s aims and others would do nothing to help. Sometimes the disdain came from men who had joined. Still ill, St. Maximilian organised meetings and conferences and started Marian circles. They spread quickly through communities and family homes across Kraków.