Saint Maximilian Kolbe

St. Maximilian Kolbe was born on January 8, 1894 AD, at Zdunska Wola, the son of poor weavers, and was baptised Rajmund. According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, Our Lady offered the boy two crowns, a white one for purity and a red one for martyrdom, and he said he would take both. He told no one but his mother, and she wrote the story down for the friars only after his death, in a letter of October 12, 1941 AD.

In 1907 AD he and his elder brother Franciszek entered the Franciscan seminary at Lwow, a school where priests are trained. At sixteen he set out to tell their superior, the Father Provincial, that he and Franciszek were leaving the order for a career in the army, when the parlour bell rang: their mother had arrived unannounced. Her visit turned both brothers back, and in 1910 AD he received the Franciscan habit and the name Maximilian.

In 1912 AD he was sent to Rome, where he took doctorates in philosophy in 1915 AD and in theology in 1919 AD. He caught tuberculosis there, and it never left him. In 1917 AD he watched processions marking two hundred years of Freemasonry cross Rome under banners declaring that Satan would reign in the Vatican.

He wrote in his notebook that the Church's enemies were at work while Catholics stayed idle. On October 16, 1917 AD he and six other friars founded the Militia of the Immaculata, to work for the conversion of sinners, above all Freemasons. He was ordained a priest in Rome on April 28, 1918 AD.

Back in Poland in 1919 AD, he was teaching at Krakow when doctors found one lung collapsed and gave him three months to live, and in June 1920 AD he was sent to the sanatorium at Zakopane for eighteen months. In January 1922 AD, paid for with money he had begged in the streets, the first issue of his monthly, the Knight of the Immaculata, came out in five thousand copies and sold out. In October 1922 AD his superior moved him to Grodno, where the magazine got printing machines of its own, which he called Brother Machinery.

In 1927 AD he found room for a bigger press on the fields of Prince Jan Drucki-Lubecki near Teresin, outside Warsaw, and on August 6 a statue of the Immaculata was blessed there. By the end of August the friars were clearing the ground with pickaxes and shovels, and sleeping on straw in a farmhouse. On December 8, 1927 AD the friary was consecrated and named Niepokalanow, the City of the Immaculata, and St. Maximilian Kolbe had the friars greet one another with the name Mary.

In 1930 AD, answering Pope Pius XI's appeal for missionaries, he went to Japan to found a second City of the Immaculata. He and four friars landed at Nagasaki with no money and no Japanese, and their first lodging was an attic where snow blew in through the broken windows. Within a month he had permission to print, in return for teaching at the Nagasaki seminary, and brought out a Japanese Knight of the Immaculata.

He built the friary on a hillside behind a mountain, facing away from the city, and named it Mugenzai no Sono, the Garden of the Immaculate. Worn down by repeated illness, he left Japan for good in 1936 AD and was elected superior of Niepokalanow. When the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 AD, the mountain sheltered his friary, and it lost only a few panes of stained glass.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 AD, and within days the presses and editorial offices at Niepokalanow had shut. In 1940 AD the friary was ordered to take in some two thousand Poles and about 1,050 Jews, resettled from land annexed to Germany. St. Maximilian Kolbe was offered German citizenship, which would have taken him out of danger, and he refused it.

The friary's daily paper had angered the German police, and reports hostile to the friars were reaching the Gestapo in Warsaw. When the Gestapo came on February 17, 1941 AD, he met them in the good habit he kept for holy days. They arrested him with four other friars and took them to Pawiak prison in Warsaw.

At the end of May 1941 AD he reached Auschwitz and was registered as prisoner 16670. At Babice, where the priests were sent to build a fence round a field, he was badly beaten by Hans Krott, a camp functionary. Tadeusz Pietrzykowski, a fellow prisoner who had been a boxing champion before the war, stopped the beating by challenging Krott to a bout.

Twice, as Pietrzykowski was winning, St. Maximilian Kolbe put a hand on the boxer's arm and spoke to him. Unable to work after the beating, he spent several weeks in the camp hospital, and through June and July he heard confessions whispered at night. On July 15, 1941 AD he wrote to his mother from the camp and signed the letter with his baptismal name, Rajmund.

At the end of July 1941 AD a prisoner from his block was missing at the count, and a search lasting a few days did not find him. By camp practice, ten men from the same block were then chosen to be starved to death in the bunker of Block 11. Karl Fritzsch, the SS officer running the selection, walked the ranks and picked the ten.

One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out that he was a father with a wife and children. St. Maximilian Kolbe stepped out of the ranks and asked to die in Gajowniczek's place, because Gajowniczek had a family who needed him alive. Fritzsch asked St. Maximilian Kolbe who he was, learned that the prisoner in front of him was a Catholic priest, and agreed to the exchange.

The ten were stripped and locked in cell 18, in the basement of Block 11, without food or water. St. Maximilian Kolbe led them in prayers, hymns and the rosary as one by one they died, and prisoners in the cells nearby joined in. After about two weeks he was one of the few still alive, and on August 14, 1941 AD a prisoner brought from the camp hospital killed him with an injection of phenol.

Pope Paul VI beatified him on October 17, 1971 AD and called him a martyr of love. Pope John Paul II canonized him on October 10, 1982 AD and decreed that he be venerated also as a martyr. Franciszek Gajowniczek, the man he saved, was at both ceremonies, and lived until 1995 AD.