Feast day: August 14

St. Maximilian Kolbe

Priest & Martyr of Charity · 1894–1941

Patron of Prisoners, journalists, drug addicts, families

Polish Franciscan and media pioneer who, in Auschwitz, stepped out of line to take the place of a stranger condemned to the starvation bunker.

Raymund Kolbe was born in 1894 in Russian-occupied Poland and as a boy, he later said, was asked by the Virgin Mary whether he would accept a crown of purity and a crown of martyrdom, and chose both. He joined the Franciscans, taking the name Maximilian Maria, earned doctorates in Rome, and threw himself into spreading the faith through the press, founding a movement of consecration to Mary and a religious publishing empire centered on a great friary near Warsaw called Niepokalanów, the 'City of the Immaculate.'

A bold missionary, he traveled to Japan and founded a friary at Nagasaki that, by providence, survived the atomic bomb. Back in Poland when the Germans invaded in 1939, he turned Niepokalanów into a refuge, sheltering thousands of refugees, many of them Jews, and continuing to publish writings the Nazis hated. In 1941 he was arrested and sent to the death camp of Auschwitz.

There, in late July 1941, a prisoner from Kolbe's barracks escaped, and the guards chose ten men to be starved to death in reprisal. When one of the condemned, a sergeant named Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out in despair for his wife and children, Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place. The astonished commandant agreed.

In the starvation bunker Kolbe led the doomed men in prayer and hymns, and was the last of the ten to die, finally killed by an injection of carbolic acid, calm to the end. Gajowniczek survived the war and lived for decades, telling the world of the priest who died for him — and was present when Kolbe was canonized in 1982 as a 'martyr of charity,' a patron of prisoners, families, and the pro-life cause.

The man he saved, Franciszek Gajowniczek, lived to 94 and attended his canonization. 'I want to take his place. He has a wife and children.'

“No one in the world can change Truth.”
— St. Maximilian Kolbe

Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.