Saint Maximilian Kolbe
St. Maximilian Kolbe, priest and martyr (1894-1941)
Maximilian was born Raymond Kolbe in Poland, January 8, 1894. At age twelve and around the time of his first Communion, he received a vision of the Virgin Mary that changed his life.
“I asked the Mother of God what was to become of me. Then she came to me holding two crowns, one white, the other red. She asked if I was willing to accept either of these crowns. The white one meant that I should persevere in purity, and the red that I should become a martyr. I said that I would accept them both.” – Saint Maximilian
In 1910, he entered the Conventual Franciscan Order. While still in the seminary, he and six friends founded the Immaculata Movement (Militia Immaculatae, Crusade of Mary Immaculate) devoted to the conversion of sinners, opposition to freemasonry , spread of the Miraculous Medal (which they wore as their habit), and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary as the path to Christ. He was sent to study in Rome where he was ordained a priest in 1918.
Father Kolbe returned to Poland in 1919 and began spreading his Militia of the Immaculata movement of Marian consecration, which he founded on October 16, 1917. In 1927, he established an evangelization center near Warsaw called Niepokalanow, the “City of the Immaculata.” By 1939, the City had expanded from 18 friars to 650, making it the largest Catholic religious house in the world.
In 1941, the Nazis imprisoned Father Maximilian in the Auschwitz death camp. There he offered his life to spare another prisoner and was condemned to slow death in a starvation bunker. On August 14, 1941, his captors ended his life with a fatal injection. Pope John Paul II canonized Maximilian as a “martyr of charity” in 1982. St. Maximilian Kolbe is considered a patron of journalists, families, prisoners, the pro-life movement and the chemically addicted.
