From the desk of the Tar Heel disciple:
August 17, 2025
Saint Maximilian Kolbe, born in that part Poland which in 1894 was controlled by the Russian Empire, was the son of an ethnic German father and a Polish mother. During the First World War, while Maximilian, by then a Conventual Franciscan, was a friar engaged in doctoral studies in Rome, his father, Julius, was fighting for the independence of Poland. Julis was captured by the Russians and hung as a traitor at the age of 43.
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During his time in Rome, Maximilian witnessed various demonstrations against the pope and the Church and proposed a new organization, the Militia Immaculatae (known in English as the “Knights of the Immaculata”), to pray and work for the conversion of sinners and the enemies of the Catholic Church, especially the Freemasons, by means of various evangelical works, Marian devotions, and especially, total consecration of its members to the Immaculate Virgin Mary, the Mother of God..
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Upon his return to Poland, he founded, in 1927 a Franciscan community not far from Warsaw that became known as the “City of Immaculate Mother of God.” It quickly became the largest Catholic religious community of men in the world, housing as many as 760 Franciscans. There, a large publishing house was established, perhaps most famous for its monthly publication, the Knight of the Immaculate, which by 1938 was distributed to 800,000 subscribers. By that time, in an effort to expand their efforts of evangelization, Maximilian and the friars there also began to operate a low power transmitter on shortwave frequencies. The outbreak of World War II impeded their desire to operate a regular broadcasting channel. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the friars provided food and shelter for thousands of refugees, including Jews.
Between 1930 and 1936, Father Kolbe was active in various locations in Asia trying to establish similar foundations to that which he had founded in Poland. His most successful establishment was in Nagasaki, which survived the US atomic bombing in 1945. Before the outbreak of the war, Maximilian had returned to Poland. There, he was arrested in September 1939 and released the following December, despite his refusal to sign a petition for recognition as having ethnic German ancestry, which had been offered to him.
In February 1941, Maximilian was again arrested and then the following May he was transferred as a prisoner to Auschwitz, where he suffered much harassment due to his priesthood. As is well known, when a prisoner successfully escaped from the camp in July 1941 and the Germans selected 10 men to be starved to death in retaliation, Maximilian volunteered to take the place of one of them. After two weeks, only Maximilian and three other men were still alive in the starvation bunker. The Germans decided to kill them with an injection of carbolic acid on August 14, 1941 (now his feast day). His body was cremated on August 15, the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
He was canonized a saint by Pope St. John Paul II, a fellow Pole, on October 10, 1982, recognized as a “martyr of charity.” But his entire missionary life and his continuous and intense devotion to the Mother of God and not only has heroic act of the offering of his life at Auschwitz deserve close attention and imitation.
Books, children’s books, video, pamphlets, and medals of St. Maximilian Kolbe, etc., can be found at:
