St. Maximilian Kolbe

On August 14, the eve of the Assumption, the Church honors Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941), the Polish Conventual Franciscan who founded the Militia Immaculatae as a young friar in Rome in 1917, and who built Niepokalanów — the "City of the Immaculate" — into the largest Catholic publishing apostolate of interwar Poland. At its peak in 1939, the friary counted 762 friars and printed over a million periodicals a month, including the daily Rycerz Niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculate).

Arrested with his community after the 1939 occupation, Kolbe was sent to Auschwitz where, in late July 1941, ten men from his bunker were selected to die by starvation in reprisal for a single escaped prisoner. When one of the condemned, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out for his wife and children, Kolbe stepped out of the ranks and offered himself in the man's place. The commandant accepted. After two weeks of deliberate starvation in the dark bunker — during which Kolbe led the condemned in hymns and prayer — the Germans finished him by carbolic-acid injection on August 14, the eve of the feast he had loved most.

The cell in Block 11 at Auschwitz, near Krakow, is now a memorial site, marked with a candle and a plaque. Franciszek Gajowniczek survived the war and lived until 1995, attending every Kolbe anniversary he could. Maximilian Kolbe was beatified in 1971 and canonized as a martyr of charity by Pope John Paul II in 1982. At Niepokalanów the friary he founded still publishes, and his relics rest in the sanctuary, while the original printing presses recall the scale of the Marian apostolate he built before his arrest.