His Life

Maximilian Kolbe was the son of a Polish family with a partial German origin. He was the second son of Juliusz Kolbe and Marianna Kolbe (née Dabrowska). His parents moved to Pabianice, where they worked first as weavers, and also ran a bookstore. In 1907, Kolbe and his elder brother Franciszek decided to join the Conventual Franciscan Order. They illegally crossed the border between Russia and Hungary and joined the Conventual Franciscan junior seminary in Lwów. In 1910, Kolbe was allowed to enter the novitiate. He professed his first vows in 1911, adopting the name Maximilian. The final vows in 1914, in Rome, adopting the names Maximilian Maria, to show his veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In 1912, he was sent to Kraków, and, in the same year, to Rome, where he studied philosophy, theology, mathematics, and physics. He took a great interest in astrophysics and the prospect of space flight. While in Rome, he designed an airplane-like spacecraft, similar in concept to the eventual space shuttle, and attempted to patent it. He earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1915 at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and the doctorate in theology.

He witnessed vehement demonstrations against Popes St. Pius X and Benedict XV by the Freemasons in Rome and was inspired to organize the Militia Immaculate, or Army of Mary, to work for conversion of sinners and the enemies of the Catholic Church through the intercession of the Virgin Mary. In 1918, he was ordained a priest. In 1919, he returned to the newly independent Poland, where he was very active in promoting the veneration of the Immaculate Virgin Mary, founding and supervising the monastery of Niepokalanów near Warsaw, a seminary, a radio station, and several other organizations and publications.

He took a series of missions to Japan, where he founded a monastery at the outskirts of Nagasaki, a Japanese paper, and a seminary. Kolbe decided to build the monastery 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 struck Nagasaki, Kolbe's monastery was saved because the blast of the bomb hit the side of the mountain that the monastery was not located on, the said side took the main blow of the blast. Had Kolbe built the monastery on the side of mountain he was advised to choose, his work and all of his fellow monks would have been destroyed.

How He Became a Saint:

Saint Maximilan Mary Kolbe was a martyr. He was sent to an Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. On February 17, 1941 he was arrested by the German Gestapo and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison. On May 25, he was transferred to Auschwitz, and was prisoner #16670. In July 1941, a man from Kolbe's barracks had disappeared. The camp commander was ordered to pick 10 men from the same barracks to be starved to death in Block 11 (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, lamenting his family, and Kolbe volunteered to take his place. 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 executed with an injection of carbolic acid.

Maximilian Kolbe risked his life for the life of another man who had a family. Do you think many people would risk their life for someone else they didn't even know that well???

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Quotes: "Courage my sons. Don't you see that we are leaving on a mission? They pay our fare in the bargain. What a piece of good luck! The thing to do now is to pray well in order to win as many souls as possible. Let us, then, tell the Blessed Virgin Mary that we are content, and that she can do with us anything she wishes"

(Maximilian Kolbe quoted this when first arrested)

"God dwells in our midst, in the Blessed Sacrament of the altar."

"He remains among us until the end of the world. He dwells on so many altars, though so often offended and profaned."

"The culmination of the Mass is not the consecration, but Communion."

"You come to me and unite yourself intimately to me under the form of nourishment. Your blood now runs in mine, Your Soul, Incarnate God, and compenatrates mine, giving courage and support. What miracles! Who would have ever imagined such!"

"If angels could be jealous of men, they would be so for one reason: Holy Communion."

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Pictures

St. Maximilian in his 30's, just before leaving for Japan (very first picture)

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Bibliography:

Maximilian Kolbe-Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chaplets:Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Martyr, 16670 of Auschwitz

My Hero Project-Maximilian Kolbe

St. Maximilian Kolbe