Maximilian Kolbe, St.

Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan Priest widely known for his heroic death at Auschwitz. When the camp commandant picked 10 prisoners at random to be executed in reprisal for a prison escape, St. Maximilian volunteered to take the place of a father of many children. What is not as well-known is the life of heroic and evangelical virtue lived by Fr. Kolbe before he was sent to Auschwitz. Though Kolbe had earned two doctorates, he only spent a short time as a seminary professor. His zeal to proclaim the gospel led him to start a Catholic newspaper which eventually reached a circulation of 250,000. Fr. Kolbe had a passion to proclaim the gospel in all forms of media, including the new media of the day, radio. He set up in 1938 one of the first Catholic radio stations in the world. But all this evangelization required an army. So he founded a Franciscan Friary outside of Warsaw called Niepokalanów. This community grew to become a small city of 1,000 friars that served as the base for his publications and radio station. Yet even this was not enough. Evangelical zeal led Fr. Kolbe to found a friary in Japan in 1931, on the outskirts of Nagasaki. All advised him to locate the monastery on a mountainside facing the city. Instead, he selected a site on the far side of the mountain. When the atomic bomb fell in 1945, the mountain shielded Kolbe’s friary, which is still in operation today. But Kolbe was not in Japan for World War II. He’d returned to the Niepokalanów community outside Warsaw as its superior in time for the rise of Naziism. Kolbe had German ancestry and was offered privileges by the Nazi invaders if he would identify himself with the German Volk. He refused. Instead, he engaged in spiritual resistance and hid 2,000 Jews inside the massive friary. The Nazis shut down the friary in 1941 and arrested Kolbe and three other leading friars, sending them to Auschwitz. Fr. Kolbe and the nine other prisoners were locked in a starvation bunker. Fr. Kolbe led his cellmates in song and prayer until one by one, they died, leaving only him alive. The Germans finally killed him by lethal injection. He was canonized by John Paul II in 1982, his feast day being the day he died, August 14, the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption. Biography by Dr. Italy