The memorial of Saint Maximilian Mary (Raymund) Kolbe, priest of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual and martyr, who, founder of the Militia of Mary Immaculate, was deported to various places of captivity, and at last in the death camp of Oświęcim, or Auschwitz, near Kraków in Poland gave himself up to the executioners in place of a fellow prisoner, offering his ministry as a holocaust of charity and an example of fidelity toward God and man.
Lifespan: 1894–1941
Beatified: 17 October 1971 by Pope Paul VI
Canonized: 10 October 1982 by Pope John Paul II, St. Peter’s Square, Rome
Memoria liturgica: 14 August
“Renew all things in Christ through the Immaculate”
Rajmund Kolbe was born at Zdunska-Wola (Łódź) in central Poland on 8 January 1894, and was baptized that same day. The family later moved to Pabianice, where Raymond attended primary school, experienced a mysterious call from the Blessed Virgin Mary to love Jesus generously, and felt the first stirrings of his religious and priestly vocation.
In 1907 Raymond was received at the seminary of the Conventual Friars Minor in Lwów, where he completed his secondary studies and came to understand more clearly that, to answer his divine vocation, he must consecrate himself to God in the Franciscan Order. On 4 September 1910 he began his novitiate under the name Friar Maximilian, and on 5 September 1911 he made his simple profession.
For the continuation of his religious and priestly formation he was transferred to Rome, where he resided from 1912 to 1919 at the Order’s International Seraphic College. There Friar Maximilian continued to cultivate those religious virtues that already marked him as a worthy and exemplary son of Saint Francis and that were preparing him to become a true priest of Christ. He made his solemn profession on 1 November 1914, taking the name Maximilian Mary. In 1915 he obtained his doctorate in philosophy, and in 1919 his doctorate in theology. Ordained to the priesthood on 28 April 1918, he celebrated his First Mass the following day in the Church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, at the altar commemorating the Apparition of the Immaculate Virgin to Alphonse Ratisbonne.
A sound and solid spiritual formation had opened Friar Maximilian’s spirit to a penetrating and profound contemplation of the mystery of Christ. Like the Franciscan theologians, he delighted in contemplating within God’s plan of salvation the Will of the Father, who through the Son and in the Holy Spirit creates, sanctifies, and saves a world in which the Incarnate and Redeeming Word constitutes the final point of God’s self-communicating love and the point of convergence of all creatures’ love as it returns to God; and in that same divine design he delighted in contemplating the presence of Mary Immaculate, who stands at the summit of participation and cooperation in the Redemptive Incarnation and in the sanctifying action of the Spirit. He also felt himself deeply and responsibly embedded in the history and life of the Church, as in that of his Franciscan Order, and he burned with the desire to labor for the building up and defense of the Kingdom of God under the patronage of Mary Immaculate, and to draw his brethren into a renewed, filial, and knightly service to the Mother of God.
These convictions of faith and resolutions of zeal, which Maximilian summed up in the motto “Renew all things in Christ through the Immaculate,” lay at the foundation of the Militia of Mary Immaculate (M.I.), to which he had given its charter and life on 16 October 1917; and they likewise form the leaven that would animate the entire spiritual and apostolic life of Father Maximilian, all the way to his martyrdom of charity.
In 1919 Father Maximilian returned to Poland, where, despite the hardships of a serious illness that confined him to extended stays at the sanatorium in Zakopane, he devoted himself with ardor to the exercise of priestly ministry and to the organization of the M.I. That same year, in Kraków, he obtained the Archbishop’s approval to print the M.I. enrollment card, and was able to recruit among the faithful the first soldiers of the Immaculate.
In 1922 he launched the publication of Rycerz Niepokalanej (The Knight of the Immaculate), the official journal of the M.I.; meanwhile, in Rome, the Cardinal Vicar canonically approved the M.I. as a Pia Unio. The M.I. subsequently attracted ever-growing membership among priests, religious, and laypeople of many nations, drawn by the programme of the Marian movement and by the founder’s reputation for holiness.
In Poland, meanwhile, Father Maximilian obtained permission to establish at the friary in Grodno an independent editorial center that allowed him to publish The Knight more effectively and to reach a wider readership — all in order to “bring the Immaculate into homes, so that souls, drawing near to Mary, might receive the grace of conversion and holiness.” This experience of spiritual and apostolic life lasted five years and prepared the ground for yet another undertaking.
In 1927 Father Kolbe began the construction, near Warsaw, of a friary-city that he would call NIEPOKALANÓW (City of the Immaculate). From the very beginning Niepokalanów took on the character of an authentic Franciscan fraternity, owing to the primacy it gave to prayer, its witness of evangelical life, and the alacrity of its apostolic work. The friars, formed and guided by Father Maximilian, lived in conformity with the Rule of Saint Francis in the spirit of consecration to the Immaculate, all cooperating in editorial work and in the use of other means of social communication for the advancement of Christ’s Kingdom and the spread of devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Niepokalanów soon became an important and fruitful vocational center, welcoming ever-increasing numbers of candidates to Franciscan life in its seminaries, and a publishing center that produced The Knight, other journals for young people and children, and other works of Christian formation and popular instruction, all in growing print runs.
From Niepokalanów, as previously from Rome, Father Kolbe’s gaze ranged over the world, impelled by love of Christ and Mary.
“Per l’Immacolata al cuore di Gesù, ecco la nostra parola d’ordine… e poiché la consacrazione di Niepokalanów è incondizionata, così essa non esclude l’ideale missionario… Non desideriamo infatti consacrare soltanto noi stessi all’Immacolata, ma vogliamo che tutte le anime del mondo si consacrino a Lei.”
“Through the Immaculate to the heart of Jesus — that is our watchword… and since the consecration of Niepokalanów is unconditional, it does not exclude the missionary ideal… For we do not wish to consecrate only ourselves to the Immaculate, but we want all the souls of the world to be consecrated to her.”
Maximilian Mary Kolbe
In 1930 Father Kolbe, a missionary of Christ and Mary, set out for the Far East. In April he arrived in Japan and reached Nagasaki, where, welcomed warmly by the Bishop, within barely a month he was able to publish The Knight of the Immaculate in Japanese. A new friary-city was then built on the slopes of Mount Hicosan on the outskirts of Nagasaki, taking the name “Mugenzai no Sono” (Garden of the Immaculate), where Father Kolbe organized and formed the new Franciscan missionary community on the model of Niepokalanów. The results proved quickly very encouraging. Conversions and baptisms multiplied, and among the newly baptized young people religious and priestly vocations ripened, so that Mugenzai no Sono too became a fruitful vocational center and the home of a novitiate and a seminary of philosophy and theology.
The editorial work reached the point of publishing The Knight in a print run of 50,000 copies, refined to a standard that the Bishop of Nagasaki acknowledged corresponded “to the mentality of the Japanese, to the point of arousing enthusiasm and favorable responses, and of sowing in pagan hearts first admiration, and then love, for the Immaculate, and of calling and leading them to the true faith.”
Father Kolbe, a true apostle of Mary, had wished to found other Cities of the Immaculate in various parts of the world; but in 1936 he was obliged to return to Poland to resume the leadership of Niepokalanów, and to be — in accordance with God’s designs — a witness to the love of Christ and Mary before the world in the terrible hour that was drawing near.
In the years 1936–39 Niepokalanów reached the height of its vocational and editorial activity. Father Kolbe, enriched by his new experiences in Japan, devoted himself not only to providing intensive spiritual formation for the numerous vocations that continuously arrived, but also to ensuring the efficient organization of the press apostolate. Some 800 friars, consecrated to the Immaculate, were engaged in the editing, printing, and distribution of books, pamphlets, and periodicals, including The Knight, with a print run of 750,000 and sometimes 1,000,000 copies, and the Little Journal, which reached 130,000 copies on weekdays and 250,000 on feast days.
Meanwhile Father Maximilian was also able to devote himself to completing the organization of the M.I., now widespread throughout the world; 1937 marked the twentieth anniversary of its foundation, and Father Kolbe commemorated it in Rome, where in February he laid the groundwork for the creation of a General Directorate of the M.I.
In September 1939 began the tragic series of trials of blood that Father Kolbe had in some way foreseen. A mad, anti-human, anti-Christian ideology drove brutal forces to invade Poland and to perpetrate unheard-of massacres and oppressions; and the persecution fell also upon Niepokalanów, where only a reduced number of friars remained. Father Maximilian confronted the situation with heroic fortitude and charity.
He received into the friary refugees, the wounded, the weak, the hungry, the discouraged — Christians and Jews alike — offering them every spiritual and material comfort. On 19 September the Nazi police deported the small group of friars from Niepokalanów to the concentration camp of Amtitz in Germany, where Father Maximilian encouraged his brethren to transform their imprisonment into a mission of witness. They were all able to return freely to Niepokalanów in December and to resume a certain rhythm of activity, despite the devastation suffered by the various departments.
The new administrative authority imposed by Nazism was well aware of the Christian spiritual power that Niepokalanów represented and exercised in Poland against every form of injustice and error; and it also knew the firm resolve that animated the friar-knights of Mary Immaculate, for it had heard directly from Father Kolbe this declaration: “We are ready to give our lives for our ideals.” The Gestapo, however, would resort to deception to incriminate Father Maximilian.
Arrested on 17 February 1941, Father Maximilian was imprisoned in the Pawiak prison, where he endured the first tortures at the hands of Nazi guards; on 28 May he was transferred to the notorious concentration camp of Auschwitz. Father Kolbe’s presence in the various blocks of the death camp was that of a Catholic priest witnessing to the faith, ready to give his life for others; that of a Franciscan religious, an evangelical witness of charity and a messenger of peace and goodness for his brethren; and that of a knight of Mary Immaculate, entrusting all men to the love of the Divine Mother. Sharing in the same sufferings inflicted on so many innocent victims, he prayed and led others in prayer, endured and forgave, illumined and strengthened in the faith, absolved sinners, and infused hope.
He was ready for the supreme gift to which he had aspired since his youth, giving to his charity this evangelical dimension: Da te ipsum aliis — Love. He fulfilled it with a surge of supreme love when he freely offered himself to take the place of a fellow prisoner condemned together with nine others, by an unjust act of reprisal, to die of starvation. In the death bunker, Father Maximilian caused to resound, through his prayer, the song of redeemed life that does not die, the song of love as the one creative force, the song of the victory promised to faith in Christ.
On 14 August 1941, the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, the inhuman and anti-Christian ferocity cut short his earthly existence with an injection of carbolic acid. The Immaculate Virgin, who had offered him in life the crown of holiness, awaited him in heaven to offer him the crown of glory.