St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe

Welcome to INSPIRING LIVES, a series on the lives of Saints in the catholic church from around the world. In this series we bring you alive the heroic lives lived by the saints. Saints are holy people who lived extraordinary lives. Each saint the Church honors responded to God's invitation to use his or her unique gifts. These saints are examples of great holiness and virtue, and thereby inspires others to do so. Their stories are unique, which inspire and invite us to be rooted in our faith. God calls each one of us to be a saint.
In this series we bring you those saints who are canonized by the Pope John Paul II. Last week we listened to the fascinating story of Saint Crispin of Viterbo, the first saint canonized by Pope John Paul II on June 20, 1982.
Crispin, who lived during the Age of Enlightenment, showed the enlightenment that gospel living provides. He developed a reputation for curing the sick. The poor and needy recognized him as their friend. Crispin appreciated the people whom God brought into his life. He became a living gospel for his confreres and for the people of Orvieto.
Today we shall listen to the heroic life of Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe (1894-1941). He was canonized on 10^th October 1982 in Rome.
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You may have heard of parents exclaiming ‘I don’t know what’s going to become of you!’ In the case of Maximilian Kolbe it was different. Kolbe's life was strongly influenced by a childhood vision of the Virgin Mary. He described: ‘That night, I asked the Mother of God what was to become of me, a Child of Faith. Then she came to me holding in her hands two crowns, one white, the other red. She asked me if I would like to have them. 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. She smiled and disappeared. After that experience he was not the same again.
Later as a Franciscan friar, when he was arrested for the first time by the Nazi panzers in 1939, he confronted the situation with heroic fortitude and charity. When on September 19 the Nazi police deported a small group of monks to the concentration camp in Germany, Kolbe animated the brothers to turn the prison into a mission of witness. He exhorted his fellow prisoners:
‘Courage, my sons. Don’t you see that we are leaving on a mission? They pay our fare in the bargain. What a piece of good luck! The thing to do now is to pray well to win as many souls as possible. Let us, then, tell the Blessed Virgin that we are content, and that she can do with us anything she wishes.’
His whole life had been a preparation. His holiness was a limitless, passionate desire to convert the whole world to God. And his beloved Blessed Virgin was his inspiration.
xxxSaint Maximilian Maria Kolbe was born on 8 January 1894 in Zduńska Wola in central Poland, then under Russian rule. He was baptized in the same day and given the name of Raymond. Rymond was the second of the five sons of Julius Kolbe and Maria Dabrowska who worked at home as weavers. His father was an ethnic German and his mother was of Polish origins.
In 1907, Kolbe and his elder brother Francis illegally crossed the border between Russia and Austria-Hungary to join the Conventual Franciscans in Lwów. In 1910, at the age of 16, 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 devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
In 1912, he was sent 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 at an anniversary celebration by the Freemasons. This event inspired Saint Kolbe to organize the Militia Immaculata, or Army of Mary, to work for conversion of sinners and enemies of the Catholic Church through the intercession of the Virgin Mary with the witness of good life, prayer, work and suffering.
In 1918, at the age of 24, he was ordained a priest. He saw religious indifference as the deadliest poison of the day. His mission was to combat it. In 1919, he returned to the newly independent Poland, where he was very active in promoting the veneration of the Immaculate Virgin Mary. For the work of publication he established a “City of the Immaculata”—Niepokalanow—which housed 800 of his Franciscan brothers. Besides founding Knight of the Immaculata, a religious magazine under Mary’s protection to preach the Good News to all nations, he also established a seminary, a radio station, and several other organizations and publications. Both the Militia and the magazine ultimately reached the one-million mark in members and subscribers.
xxxDuring 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. After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, his monastery was ransacked, and Father Kolbe and about 40 other friars were transported to a holding camp in Germany, and later to one in Poland. They were released and allowed to return to the monastery on December 8, 1939.
Father Kolbe, as a journalist, publisher and intellectual who had refused German citizenship, was considered a threat to absolute German domination. To incriminate him, the Gestapo permitted one final printing of the "Knight of Mary Immaculate" in December of 1940. It was in this issue that Father Maximilian wrote:
The real conflict is inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of concentration camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are victories on the battle-field if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?
On February 17, 1941, Father Maximilian was again arrested, this time on charges of aiding Jews and the Polish underground. He was imprisoned initially in the Pawiak prison and on 28 May, he was transferred to Auschwitz as prisoner #16670. Maximilian carried on his priestly work surreptitiously in the prison, hearing confessions in unlikely places and celebrating the Lord's Supper with bread and wine smuggled in for that purpose.
To discourage escapes, the camp in which Father Kolbe was imprisoned, had a rule that if a man escaped, ten men would be killed in retaliation. In July 1941 a man from Kolbe's bunker escaped, prompting the deputy camp commander to pick 10 men to be starved to death in an underground bunker. Among the selected 10 was a Sergeant named Francis Gajowniczek. When he cried out , ‘my wife , my children’, Maximilian stepped forward and said, "I would like to take that man’s place. He has a wife and children.’ Who are you? Came the question. ‘I am a Catholic priest’. The officer was happy to make the exchange.
In the “block of death” they were ordered to strip naked, and their slow starvation began in darkness. In the starvation cell, Father Kolbe led the other condemned men in song and prayer and encouraged them by telling them they would soon be with Mary in Heaven. After two weeks of starvation, four were alive and only Kolbe was fully conscious. The guards wanted the bunker emptied and they gave Kolbe a lethal injection of carbolic acid. Witnesses say that he raised his fleshless left arm and calmly waited for the injection. His remains were cremated on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption of Mary.
Pope Paul VI proclaimed him Blessed on 17^th October 1971, and Pope John Paul II proclaimed him Saint and Martyr on 10 October 1982. His feast day is August 14^th and is the Patron Saint of Addicts and Drug addiction.P.J. Joseph SJ