Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Franciscan Media opens with a line every parent has said - "I don't know what's going to become of you!" - and then gives his answer in his own words. ¹

"I prayed very hard to Our Lady to tell me what would happen to me. She appeared, holding in her hands two crowns, one white, one red. She asked if I would like to have them - one was for purity, the other for martyrdom. I said, 'I choose both.' She smiled and disappeared." ¹

"After that he was not the same." ¹ He entered the minor seminary of the Conventual Franciscans at Lviv and became a novice at sixteen. ¹ He took doctorates in philosophy and theology and was "deeply interested in science, even drawing plans for rocket ships." ¹

Ordained at twenty-four, "Maximilian Mary Kolbe saw religious indifference as the deadliest poison of the day. His mission was to combat it." ¹ He had already founded the Militia of the Immaculata, "whose aim was to fight evil with the witness of the good life, prayer, work, and suffering." ¹

Then he founded a magazine, the Knight of the Immaculata, and for the work of printing it he built a city. Niepokalanow, the "City of the Immaculata", housed seven hundred of his Franciscan brothers. ¹ He founded a second one in Nagasaki. ¹ Vatican News notes he "was a missionary in Japan before returning to a Poland ravaged by war." ²

"Both the Militia and the magazine ultimately reached the one-million mark in members and subscribers." ¹ He was, in modern terms, running a publishing house at national scale out of a friary.

In 1939 "the Nazi panzers overran Poland with deadly speed. Niepokalanow was severely bombed." ¹ Kolbe and his friars were arrested and released in under three months, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. ¹

He was arrested again in 1941. Franciscan Media states the purpose plainly: "The Nazis' purpose was to liquidate the select ones, the leaders." ¹ He reached Auschwitz and the end "came quickly, three months later ... after terrible beatings and humiliations." ¹

A prisoner escaped. The commandant announced that ten men would die, and "he relished walking along the ranks. 'This one. That one.'" ¹

As the ten were being marched to the starvation bunkers, "Number 16670 dared to step from the line." ¹

"I would like to take that man's place. He has a wife and children." "Who are you?" "A priest." ¹

Franciscan Media marks what is missing from that exchange: "No name, no mention of fame. Silence." ¹ The commandant "kicked Sergeant Francis Gajowniczek out of line and ordered Fr. Kolbe to go with the nine." ¹

In the block of death they were stripped and left to starve in the dark. "But there was no screaming - the prisoners sang." ¹ By the eve of the Assumption four were still alive. The jailer came to finish him "as he sat in a corner praying. He lifted his fleshless arm to receive the bite of the hypodermic needle. It was filled with carbolic acid." ¹ His body was burned with the others. ¹

Franciscan Media names him a patron of addicts and of recovery from drug addiction - because of what killed him, a needle, and because of what he did with it. ¹

He is also a patron of journalists and publishers, of families, and of prisoners. Vatican News gives the title John Paul II canonized him under: "martyr of charity." ² That phrase is the whole argument - he was not killed for professing the faith but for an act of love, and the Church decided that was martyrdom.

The feast of Saint Maximilian Kolbe is August 14, the day he died at Auschwitz in 1941. ¹² Vatican News states it directly: "This Polish Conventual Franciscan, whose feast day is August 14." ²

It falls on the eve of the Assumption, which is the day the jailer came for him. ¹ He was beatified in 1971 and canonized in 1982. ¹

Franciscan Media makes the point that matters and it is worth repeating before anything else: "Maximilian Mary Kolbe's death was not a sudden, last-minute act of heroism. His whole life had been a preparation." ¹ A man who has spent twenty years founding things, printing things and organizing seven hundred friars does not become a different person in a roll call. He does the next thing.

"A priest." ¹ Two words, offered instead of a name, a doctorate, a magazine with a million subscribers or a city he built. It was the only fact that mattered for what he was asking to do, and he gave no other.

Then the bunker, and the singing. ¹ Ten naked men starving in the dark, and what the guards heard was not screaming. He was a priest in there for two weeks, which is the only thing he could still be, and he was it.

The rocket ships are worth keeping too. ¹ A friar drawing spacecraft in the 1920s is not a man with a narrow imagination or a small idea of what is possible. The same appetite that wanted to reach the whole world with a magazine is the one that stepped out of the line, and it is not obvious in advance which form it will take.