CrucisSt. Maximilian Kolbe
St. Maximilian Kolbe was born Raymund Kolbe on 8 January 1894 at Zduńska Wola, Poland, and died on 14 August 1941 in the Auschwitz concentration camp. As a boy he had a vision of the Virgin Mary offering him two crowns, one white for purity and one red for martyrdom, and he chose both. He became a Conventual Franciscan friar and priest, an ardent apostle of the Immaculate Virgin who founded the Militia Immaculatae and built the great friary and publishing center of Niepokalanów, later carrying his mission as far as Japan.
After the German occupation of Poland he sheltered refugees, including many Jews, and continued his outlawed publishing, for which he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. When a prisoner from his block was selected to die by starvation as a reprisal, Kolbe stepped forward and offered his own life in the man's place. He endured the starvation bunker with prayer and, when he alone survived after two weeks, was killed by an injection of carbolic acid. He was canonized as a martyr in 1982 by Pope St. John Paul II; the man he saved, Franciszek Gajowniczek, lived to attend the ceremony.
Selected quotes
“The man who gave his life for a stranger in the hunger bunker was not doing something extraordinary — he was doing what love always does when it is not afraid.”
“The knight of the Immaculata does not fight with weapons of iron but with weapons of love — the rosary, the press, and the witness of a holy life.”
“The missionary who goes without the Immaculata goes poorly equipped — take her with you and you bring the most powerful advocate any mission has ever had.”