St. Maximilian Kolbe

Maximilian Kolbe was born Raymond Kolbe near Łódź, in central Poland, on 8 January 1894, and baptized the same day. He entered the Conventual Franciscan seminary at Lwów at thirteen, took the name Maximilian at his novitiate, and was sent to Rome, where he earned doctorates in philosophy and theology and was ordained a priest in 1918. He had already founded the Militia of the Immaculata the year before, at twenty-three.

Back in Poland, and often seriously ill, he built something enormous. In 1922 he began publishing a magazine, Rycerz Niepokalanej — the Knight of the Immaculata. He set up a printing operation at Grodno, and in 1927 started building a friary near Warsaw he called Niepokalanów, the City of the Immaculata. In 1930 he sailed for Japan, reached Nagasaki, and was publishing the magazine in Japanese within about a month; a second city followed on the slopes of Mount Hikosan. By the late 1930s Niepokalanów housed some eight hundred friars writing, printing and distributing, with the Knight running to 750,000 copies and sometimes a million.

When Germany invaded in 1939 he took refugees into the friary — the wounded, the hungry, the frightened, Christians and Jews — and gave them what he had. He told the authorities plainly: "We are ready to give our lives for our ideals." He was arrested in February 1941, tortured at Pawiak prison, and sent to Auschwitz in May. When prisoners condemned to starve were lined up, he stepped forward on his own and asked to take the place of one of them, because that man was a father and his family needed him. The request was granted. After more than two weeks of hunger he was killed by injection on 14 August 1941. The man he replaced, Franciszek Gajowniczek, was still alive forty-one years later, and stood in St. Peter's Square at his canonization.