Maximilian Kolbe.html



Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe
A prayer card showing St. Maximilian before Mary as the Immaculate Conception, with a prison camp depicted in the background
Martyr
Born	7 January or 8 January 18941, Zduńska Wola, Russian Empire in what is now Poland
Died	14 August 1941 (aged 47), Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church, Lutheran Church, Anglican Church
Beatified	17 October 1971, St. Peter Basilica, Rome, Italy2 by Pope Paul VI
Canonized	10 October 1982, Rome, Italy by Pope John Paul II
Major shrine	Basilica of the Immaculate Mediatrix of Grace, Niepokalanów, Poland
Feast	August 14
Patronage	drug addicts, families, journalists, prisoners, pro-life movement

Maximilian Kolbe (8 January 1894–14 August 1941), also known as Maksymilian or Massimiliano Maria Kolbe and "Apostle of Consecration to Mary," born as Rajmund Kolbe, was a Polish Conventual Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz in Poland.

He was canonized by the Catholic Church as Saint Maximilian Kolbe on 10 October 1982 by Pope John Paul II, and declared a martyr of charity. He is the patron saint of drug addicts,³ political prisoners,³ families,³ journalists,³ prisoners³ and the pro-life movement.³ Pope John Paul II declared him the "The Patron Saint of Our Difficult Century".⁴

Biography

Maximilian Kolbe was born in January 1894 in Zduńska Wola, which was at that time part of the Russian Empire. Maximilian was the second son of Julius Kolbe and Maria Dabrowska. His father was an ethnic German and his mother of Polish origins. He had four brothers, Francis, Joseph, Walenty (who lived a year) and Andrew (who lived 4 years). His parents moved to Pabianice where they worked first as basket weavers. Later his mother worked as a midwife (often donating her services), and owned a shop in part of her rented house which sold groceries and household goods. Julius Kolbe worked at the Krushe and Ender Mill and also worked on rented land where he grew vegetables. In 1914 Julius joined Józef Piłsudski's Polish Legions and was captured by the Russians and hanged for fighting for the independence of a partitioned Poland.

Kolbe's life was strongly influenced by a childhood vision of the Virgin Mary that he later described in the following words:

"That night, 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 me 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."⁵

In 1907 Kolbe and his elder brother Francis decided to join the Conventual Franciscans. They illegally crossed the border between Russia and Austria-Hungary and joined the Conventual Franciscan junior seminary in Lwów. In 1910 Kolbe was allowed to enter the novitiate. He professed his first vows in 1911, adopting the name Maximilian, and the final vows in 1914, in Rome, adopting the names Maximilian Maria, to show his veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In 1912 he was sent to Kraków, and in the same year to a college in Rome, where he studied philosophy, theology, mathematics, and physics. He earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1915 at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and the doctorate in theology in 1919 at the Pontifical University of St. Bonaventure. During his time as a student, he witnessed vehement demonstrations against Popes St. Pius X and Benedict XV in Rome and was inspired to organize the Militia Immaculata, or Army of Mary, to work for conversion of sinners and the enemies of the Catholic Church through the intercession of the Virgin Mary. The Immaculata friars utilized the most modern printing and administrative techniques in publishing catechetical and devotional tracts, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 230,000 and a monthly magazine with a circulation of over one million.⁶

In 1918 Kolbe was ordained a priest. In 1919 he returned to the newly independent Poland, where he was very active in promoting the veneration of the Immaculate Virgin Mary, founding and supervising the monastery of Niepokalanów near Warsaw, a seminary, a radio station and several other organizations and publications. Between 1930 and 1936 he took a series of missions to Japan, where he founded a monastery at the outskirts of Nagasaki, a Japanese paper and a seminary. The monastery he founded remains prominent in the Roman Catholic Church in Japan. Kolbe decided to build the monastery on a mountain side that, according to Shinto beliefs, was not the side best suited to be in tune with nature. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Kolbe's monastery was saved because the blast of the bomb hit the other side of the mountain, which took the main force of the blast. Had Kolbe built the monastery on the preferred side of mountain as he was advised, his work and all of his fellow monks would have been destroyed.

Auschwitz

Stained glass depiction of Kolbe as prisoner in the Franciscan church of Szombathely, Hungary

During the Second World War he provided shelter to refugees from Greater Poland, including 2,000 Jews whom he hid from Nazi persecution in his friary in Niepokalanów. He was also active as a radio amateur, with Polish call letters SP3RN, vilifying Nazi activities through his reports.

On 17 February 1941 he was arrested by the German Gestapo and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison, and on May 25th he was transferred to Auschwitz as prisoner #16670.

In July 1941 a man from Kolbe's barracks vanished, prompting SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp commander, to pick 10 men from the same barracks to be starved to death in Block 13 (notorious for torture), in order to deter further escape attempts.⁷ (The man who had disappeared was later found drowned in the camp latrine.) One of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, lamenting his family, and Kolbe volunteered to take his place.

During the time in the cell he led the men in songs and prayer. After three weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. He encouraged others that they would soon be with Mary in heaven. Each time the guards checked on him he was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell and looking calmly at those who entered, while the others laid moaning and complaining, on the ground around him. Finally he was murdered with an injection of carbolic acid.⁸ Some who were present at the injection say that he raised his left arm and calmly waited for the injection. He died soon after. His remains were cremated on the Assumption of Mary.

Canonization

Kolbe Statue (left) - Westminster Abbey

Father Kolbe was beatified as a confessor by Pope Paul VI in 1971 and was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 10 October 1982 in the presence of Franciszek Gajowniczek. Upon canonization, the Pope declared St. Maximilian Kolbe not a confessor, but a martyr. St. Maximilan's beatification miracle was the July 1948 cure of intestinal tuberculosis in Angela Testoni, and in August 1950, the cure of calcification of the arteries/sclerosis of Francis Ranier was attributed to the intercession of St. Maximilan.

Although the canonization of St. Maximilan Kolbe isn't controversial, his recognition as a martyr is, given that a Christian martyr is one who is killed in odium Fidei while Kolbe wasn't assassinated strictly out of hatred for the Faith.

He is one of ten 20th-century martyrs from across the world who are depicted in statues above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey, London.

After his canonization St. Maximilian Kolbe's feast day was included in the General Roman Calendar used by the ordinary form of the Roman rite of the Catholic Liturgy. Maximilian Kolbe also loved to help prisoners he cared for them a lot.

Legacy

Kolbe Catholic College in Rockingham, Western Australia has Kolbe as its patron saint. St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church in Missisauga, Ontario, Canada, a Polish ethnic parish, also has Kolbe as its patron,

See also

• Amateur radio history
• Holocaust theology

References

• Operation Kolbe (in Spanish) Volunteers to take the place of kidnapped people in Colombia
• Kolbe Mt Maria College
• Rees, Laurence. Auschwitz: A New History, Public Affairs, 2005. ISBN 1-58648-357-9
• Patron Saints Index: Saint Maximilian Kolbe