Maximilian Kolbe

Rajmund Kolbe was born on January 8, 1894, in Zdunska Wola, in Russian-occupied Poland. His parents were devout Franciscan tertiaries; two of their sons entered religious life. Rajmund joined the Conventual Franciscan novitiate in 1907 and took the name Maximilian. He made his final profession in 1910 and was sent to Rome for studies, earning doctorates in philosophy and theology at the Gregorian and Seraphic universities.

In Rome in October 1917, he founded the Militia Immaculatae — the Knights of the Immaculate — a Marian apostolate aimed at the conversion of sinners and enemies of the Church. It grew into a worldwide movement. He was ordained a priest on April 28, 1918, returned to Poland, and in 1927 founded Niepokalanów — City of the Immaculate — a Franciscan friary near Warsaw that became one of the largest in the world, housing more than 700 brothers and operating a publishing house, radio station, and press that reached hundreds of thousands of readers.

In 1930 he traveled to Japan and founded a monastery near Nagasaki — positioned on the side of a mountain that would shelter it from the atomic bomb fifteen years later. He returned to Poland in 1936 to lead Niepokalanów. When Germany invaded in September 1939, Kolbe and his brothers sheltered thousands of Polish refugees, including Jews. He was arrested by the Gestapo on February 17, 1941, and transferred to Auschwitz on May 28 as prisoner 16670.

In late July 1941, a prisoner escaped and Nazi camp policy required ten men from the same barracks to be starved to death in reprisal. When one of the selected men — Franciszek Gajowniczek, a married father — cried out for his family, Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place. The camp commander permitted it. Kolbe and the nine others were locked in an underground bunker without food or water. He led them in prayer and hymns. After two weeks, four men remained alive. On August 14, 1941 — the eve of the Assumption — an SS guard administered lethal phenol injections to those still living, Kolbe among them.

He was beatified by Pope Paul VI on October 17, 1971. At his canonization on October 10, 1982, Pope John Paul II declared Kolbe a martyr of charity, the first person so designated in the modern canonization process. Franciszek Gajowniczek, the man whose place Kolbe had taken, was present at the ceremony.