08/14/2025
Today is the feast day of St. Maximilian Kolbe, another saint martyred during WWII. Pope St. John Paul II called St. Maximilian Kolbe “the patron saint of our difficult [20th] century.” More than perhaps any other saint, St. Maximilian Kolbe demonstrated Jesus' words, "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
St. Maximilian was born as Rajmund Kolbe into a Catholic family in Poland. As a young boy he was a handful; he was difficult to control and tended to get into trouble. But when he made his first communion, somewhere between the ages of ten and twelve, his behavior changed. Around this time, he experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary, and in the vision, she held a crown in each hand, one white and one red. She explained to Rajmund that the white crown represented a consecrated religious life, and the red crown represented martyrdom. She asked him if he would be willing to accept either. Rajmund Kolbe said he would accept both.
St. Maximilian suffered from tuberculosis for most of his life. When Rajmund grew up he became a Franciscan friar and he took the name Maximilian, the name of a martyr in the early Church. He was also ordained a priest. Maximilian made several missionary journeys, including to Nagasaki, Japan, where a monastery founded by him remains today – it remained standing even after the atomic bomb fell. Maximilian developed a special devotion to the Virgin Mary, who had appeared to him in childhood, and encouraged others to do so as well.
When Adolf Hi**er came to power, St. Maximilian was back in Poland, and his monastery published a number of papers criticizing the N**i party. He also sheltered many people fleeing from the war in his monastery, including at least 2,000 Jewish refugees.
In 1941 the German powers shut down Maximilian’s monastery and he was arrested and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was tortured and forced to do hard labor, all while still suffering from tuberculosis. Those who knew him during that time testified that he was always brave, always calm, always prayerful, always encouraging others.
One day a prisoner managed to escape from the concentration camp. When this was discovered by the prison guards, they decided to deter anyone else from attempting this in a particularly horrible way. They chose ten prisoners at random and sentenced them to death by starvation. One of these men, another Polish Catholic named Francis Gajowniczek, began to weep for his wife and children.
St. Maximilian – who was not one of the ten prisoners originally chosen – stepped forward and told the guards that he would like to take Francis Gajowniczek’s place. “I am a Catholic priest and I have no wife or children,” he told them.
St. Maximilian and the others were taken to a cell where they were given no food or water and left to die. It is very hard to imagine how human beings could treat other human beings this way, or how Maximilian managed to remain calm and prayerful during this time. Each time the guards would come to remove the bodies of those who had died, they would find Fr. Maximilian on his knees, encouraging the remaining prisoners to pray with him. Somehow St. Maximilian managed to survive for several weeks. Finally, on August 14, the day before the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the N**is executed him with a lethal injection. He is said to have calmly lifted his left arm for the needle when they came for him.
On October 10, 1982, Pope John Paul II canonized Maximilian Kolbe as a saint. Francis Gajowniczek, his wife, and his children, among thousands of others were present for his canonization.
St. Maximilian Kolbe is a hero among heroes, at a very dark time in history when many people were too afraid or too deluded to stand up to evil. But that kind of bravery and heroism doesn’t come out of nowhere. If we want to be heroes too, (whether in big ways or small ways), our entire lives need to be a practice for that. St. Maximilian prayed all the time and was always sacrificing his wants for what he knew was right. We should also be praying and practicing.
St. Maximilian was a “difficult” child. Later on he became a “difficult” adult – to an evil regime. What was once something problematic in his character became transformed into something that made him a beloved saint. When we give our lives to God, He doesn’t make us into someone unrecognizable – he transforms even the things that seem like“bad” things in us into qualities that serve His Kingdom. We become more like ourselves, the selves we were meant to be, not less.
