St Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941) Franciscan and martyr
St
Maximilian Kolbe was a Franciscan friar who volunteered himself to take
the place of a man who pleaded to be spared in a death cell in
Auschwitz.
He was also a missionary, an evangeliser and publicist of
note.
Founded the Knights of the Immaculate
Raymond
Kolbe was born of religious parents at Zdanska Wola near Lodz in Poland.
As a teenager, he became a Conventual Franciscan taking the name
Maximilian Mary. He was sent to Rome to study philosophy and theology
and was ordained a priest there in 1919. He had a great devotion to Our
Lady. Seeing the opposition to Popes Pius X and Benedict XIV he began a
religious movement called the Militia Immaculata, or Knights of
the Immaculate, and when he returned to Poland he built a religious
complex on land given him by Polish Prince Jan Drucko-Lubecki just west
of Warsaw, which he called the "City of the Immaculate", Niepokalonów.
He also published a newspaper and started a radio station.
A missionary in Japan and India
In
1930 Maximilian went as a missionary to Japan where he founded a
monastery at the outskirts of Nagasaki, an evangelising newspaper in
Japanese and a seminary. The monastery he founded remains prominent in
the Roman Catholic Church in Japan. Kolbe decided to build it 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 was dropped on
Nagasaki, Kolbe’s monastery was saved because the blast of the bomb hit
the other side of the mountain, which took the main force of the blast.
Had Kolbe built the monastery on the preferred side of the mountain as
he was advised, his work and all of his fellow monks would have been
destroyed. A similar venture started in India did not continue through
lack of personnel.
Return to Poland
Due to
ill health Kolbe returned to Poland in 1936 to become superior of the
religious complex at Niepokalonów with some 762 priests and brother
friars. When the war started in 1939 he provided shelter for refugees,
including 2,000 Jews whom he hid from Nazi persecution. On February 17,
1941 he was arrested by the German Gestapo and later transferred to
Auschwitz.
Auschwitz August 1941
In July 1941
a man from Kolbe’s barracks vanished, prompting the deputy camp
commander to pick 10 men from the same barracks to be starved to death
in a cell in Block 13 (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, saying he had a family, and Kolbe volunteered to take his
place.
"A saint without relics!"
During the
time in the cell he led the men in songs and prayer. After three weeks
of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still
alive. Finally he was murdered with an injection of carbolic acid. When
this story and the cremation of his body was reported to the Auschwitz
commandant, a former Catholic, he laughed, saying, "A saint without
relics!"
Canonisation
The man Kolbe had stood
in for, Franciszek Gajowniczek, survived the concentration camp, but
found that his teenage sons had died in the Warsaw uprising at the end
of the war and his wife never recovered from the death of her children.
This man went to the Knights of the Immaculate to tell them what Father
Kolbe had done for him. His testimony started the porocess of
canonisation. He was present at Maximilian's beatification by Pope Paul
VI in 1971 and at his canonisation by Pope John Paul II in 1982.
A martyr
At
his canonisation Maximilian Kolbe was proclaimed a martyr, which
strictly speaking is not correct, since he was not put to death in odium fidei ("out
of hatred of the faith"). He is one of ten 20th-century martyrs from
across the world whose statues stand above the Great West Door of
Westminster Abbey, London. After his canonization in 1982 St. Maximilian
Kolbe’s feast day was included on 14th August in the General Roman Calendar used of the Roman rite of the Catholic Liturgy (ordinary form).