Saint Maximilian Kolbe (January 8,
1894-August 14, 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 October 10, 1982 by Pope John Paul II, and
declared a martyr of charity. He is the patron saint of drug addicts,
political prisoners, families, journalist, amateur radio, prisoners, and
the pro-life movement. Pope John Paul II declared him the "The Patron
Saint of Our Difficult Century".
Kolbe, the son of a Polish family with
partial German origin, was born in 1894 in Zduńska Wola, at that time
part of Russian Empire, as the second son of Juliusz Kolbe and Marianna
Kolbe (nee Dąbrowska). His parents moved to Pabianice, where they worked
first as weavers, then ran a bookstore. Later, in 1914, his father
joined Jozef Piłsudski's Polish Legions and was captured by the Russians
for fighting for the independence of a partitioned Poland.
In 1907, Kolbe and his elder brother
Franciszek decided to join the Conventual Franciscan Order. They
illegally crossed the border between Russia and Austria-Hungary and
joined the Conventual Franciscan junior seminary in Lwow. 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 Krakow, and, in the
same year, to Rome, where he studied philosophy, theology, mathematics,
and physics. He took a great interest in astrophysics and the prospect
of space flight. While in Rome he designed[citation needed] an
airplane-like spacecraft, similar in concept to the eventual space
shuttle, and attempted to patent it. 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 by the Freemasons 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. In 1918, he was ordained a priest. In the
conservative publications of the Militia Immaculatae, he particularly
condemned Freemasonry, Communism, Zionism, Capitalism and Imperialism.
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
Niepokalanow 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 struck Nagasaki, Kolbe's monastery was saved because the
blast of the bomb hit the side of the mountain that the monastery was
not located on, the said side took the main blow of the blast. Had Kolbe
built the monastery on the side of mountain he was advised to choose,
his work and all of his fellow monks would have been destroyed.
Auschwitz
During the Second World War, in the friary,
Kolbe provided shelter to refugees from Greater Poland, including 2,000
Jews whom he hid from Nazi persecution in his friary in Niepokalanow. He
was also active as a radio amateur, with Polish call letters SP3RN,
vilifying Nazi activities through his reports.
On February 17, 1941, he was arrested by the German Gestapo and
imprisoned in the Pawiak prison, and, on May 25, was transferred to
Auschwitz I as prisoner #16670.
In July 1941, a man from Kolbe's barracks
had vanished, prompting SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Karl Fritzsch, the
Lagerfuhrer (i.e., the camp commander), to pick 10 men from the same
barracks to be starved to death in Block 11 (notorious for torture), in
order to deter further escape attempts. (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 was still alive. Finally he was executed with an injection of
carbolic acid.
Kolbe 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. He was canonized by Pope John Paul II
on 10 October 1982, in the presence of Gajowniczek.
