Perhaps the most well-known story of St Maksymilian Maria Kolbe's life is how it ended. The Polish Franciscan priest has become famed for volunteering to die in the place of another prisoner at Auschwitz.
Before Auschwitz, Kolbe's life was laced with drama and trauma. At age 12, he received a mystical vision of Our Lady, who offered him two crowns: one white, for purity, and one red, for martyrdom. The boy Kolbe said he would accept them both. As he grew up, he suffered the loss of two brothers to tuberculosis. When World War I erupted, his father joined the fight for an independent Poland; the Russians ultimately hanged him as a traitor.
Kolbe became a priest in 1918, devoting every single endeavor to Our Lady. He founded the Militia Immaculata, a society that worked for the conversion of sinners, particularly against freemasonry and communism. Over the next 20 years, Kolbe accomplished an astonishing degree of activity—he taught in seminary; served in Japan as a missionary; established evangelistic publications and radio programs; and founded a new monastery dedicated to publishing apostolates.
When the Nazis invaded his beloved Poland, Kolbe was one of the few friars who remained at the monastery, which he converted to a makeshift hospital for refugees. The Gestapo arrested and released him, but he persisted in publishing anti-Nazi material. He and his fellow friars risked their lives to shelter 2,000 Jews from persecution. Finally, the Gestapo shuttered the monastery and sent Kolbe to Auschwitz. Two months after his imprisonment, someone escaped the camp. In retaliation, the S.S. commander chose ten prisoners at random to die in the starvation bunker. Kolbe was not one of them. But he volunteered to take the place of a husband and father who was.
For two weeks, he and the others were starved of all food and water, yet witnesses recounted that from Kolbe's cell came only the sound of prayer and hymns sung to the Immaculata. Kolbe did not die from this agony. His final triumph finally came when the guards injected him with carbolic acid on August 14, 1941.
There's a particular detail of Kolbe‘s martyrdom that captures the impossibly personal love of God for each of us. God isn’t a generic reservoir of love that we can try to access; God sees you and knows you and loves you as intimately as if you were the only creature He ever made.
Decades before his martyrdom, Kolbe had prayed of his desire to “be ground to dust for the Immaculata and have this dust be blown away by the wind all over the world."
On August 14, he gave up his life. On August 15, the feast of his beloved Immaculata's Assumption into Heaven, Kolbe's martyred body was made into ashes—dust—and his witness has indeed blown all over the world.
His feast in August 14.
We didn't plan for a whole week of Kolbe-related posts, but inspiration struck! Come back every day this week for an extended resource for still-grimage and pilgrimage with St Maximilian Kolbe; a time-travel throwback to my college Poland trip; Marian gift ideas, and artwork honoring his beloved Immaculata.
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The Immaculata Prayer
St Maximilian Kolbe composed this prayer as a daily consecration to Mary:
Immaculata, Queen and Mother of the Church, I renew my consecration to you for this day and for always, so that you might use me for the coming of the Kingdom of Jesus in the whole world. To this end I offer you all my prayers, actions and sacrifices of this day.
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