MEMORIAL OF SAINT MAXIMILIAN MARY KOLBE, PRIEST AND MARTYR ~ FEAST DAY: AUGUST 14TH: Today, we celebrate the Memorial of Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe, Priest and Martyr. Through the intercession of our Blessed Mother Mary and Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe on this feast day, we humbly pray for our families and families all over the world, we pray for peace, love, justice and unity in our families and our world. We pray for those who are imprisoned, drug addicts and journalists. We pray for the poor and needy. We pray for the sick and dying, especially those who are sick with the coronavirus, heart diseases, lung diseases and those suffering from cancers and other terminal diseases. And we continue to pray for our Holy Father, the Clergy, for vocations to the priesthood and religious life, for the Church, for persecuted christians, for the conversion of sinners, and Christians all over the world.🙏🏾
SAINT MAXIMILIAN MARY KOLBE, PRIEST AND MARTYR: St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe (1894-1941) was a Polish Franciscan Priest, Missionary and Martyr, who died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, during World War II, and is remembered as a “martyr of charity” for dying in place of another prisoner who had a wife and children. St. Maximilian is also celebrated for his missionary work, his evangelistic use of modern means of communication, and for his lifelong devotion to the Virgin Mary under her title of the Immaculate Conception. All these aspects of St. Maximilian’s life converged in his founding of the Militia Immaculata. The worldwide organization continues St. Maximilian Kolbe’s mission of bringing individuals and societies into the Catholic Church, through dedication to the Virgin Mary.
St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe was born Raymond Kolbe in Poland on January 8, 1894. The son of a weaver and a midwife, a devout Christian family. As an impulsive and badly-behaved child, he prayed to the Virgin Mary for guidance, and when he was 10 years old he was visited by the Virgin Mary, who offered him obe of two crowns. One was white for purity and virginity and the other was red for martyrdom. St. Maximilian said he would accept both crowns. Radically changed by the incident, he entered the minor seminary of the Conventual Franciscan Order at age 13, in 1907. At age 20 he made his solemn vows as a Franciscan, earning a doctorate in philosophy the next year. Soon after, however, he developed chronic tuberculosis, which eventually destroyed one of his lungs and weakened the other. Ten years later, on October 16, 1917, while studying for the priesthood in Rome, in response to anti-Catholic demonstrations by Italian Freemasons, Friar Maximilian organized a group of six other Franciscan Friars and founded the Militia of the Immaculatae (Army of the Immaculate One) in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary to work for the conversion of sinners under her protection and to oppose the evil of Freemasonry. From it came the Knights of the Immaculate magazine that reached a circulation of 750,000, as well as a radio show, both of which became a resource for strengthening faith across Poland. The group’s founding coincided almost exactly with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and the Marian apparitions at Fatima, Portugal.
As a Franciscan priest, Fr. Maximilian returned to work in Poland during the 1920s. In 1927, he established an evangelization center near Warsaw called Niepokalanow, the “City of the Immaculata.” There, he promoted the Catholic faith through newspapers and magazines which eventually reached an extraordinary circulation, published from a monastery so large it was called the “City of the Immaculata.” By 1939, the City had expanded from eighteen friars to an incredible 800, making it the largest Catholic religious house in the world. In 1930 he traveled to the Far East and founded another comparable monastery in Nagasaki, Japan and established a Japanese Catholic press by 1936, along with a similarly ambitious monastery. From Japan, he went on to India where he furthered the Movement. That year, in 1936, he returned home to Poland for the last time because of ill health. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Fr. Kolbe was arrested and imprisoned and released briefly. St. Maximilian was offered German citizenship because his father was German. He refused however and stayed in Poland with his monastery, providing shelters for refugees. During World War II, St. Maximilian Kolbe housed over 3,000 Polish refugees at his monastery, including about 2000 Jews. The monastery’s work attracted the anger of the Nazis. During this time when he was briefly freed in 1940, he published one last issue of the Knight of the Immaculata before his final arrest and transportation to the notorious concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1941 because of his effective work. There he endured special cruelty because he was a Catholic priest. St. Maximilian ministered to the prisoners.
On July 31, 1941, in reprisal for one prisoner’s escape, ten prisoners were chosen to die. At the beginning of August that year, these ten prisoners were sentenced to death by starvation in punishment for that one inmate’s escape. Moved by one man’s lamentation for his wife and children, Fr. Kolbe volunteered to die in his place. Survivors of the camp testified that the starving prisoners could be heard praying and singing hymns, led by the priest who had volunteered for an agonizing death. He was condemned to slow death in the starvation bunker and he patiently bore his sufferings. After being starved for two weeks, he was the last to die, enduring two weeks of starvation, thirst, and neglect and still found alive. On August 14, 1941, the night before the Church’s feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the impatient camp officials decided to hasten Fr. Kolbe’s death with a lethal injection, he was injected with carbolic acid. St. Maximilian Kolbe’s body was cremated by the camp officials on the feast of the Assumption. He had stated years earlier: “I would like to be reduced to ashes for the cause of the Immaculata, and may this dust be carried over the whole world, so that nothing would remain.” Pope John Paul II canonized St. Maximilian as a “martyr of charity” on October 10, 1982, the first saint to be so named. Present at the canonization was Francis Gajowniczec, the man whose life Father Kolbe had saved. St. Maximilian Kolbe is venerated on August 14th as the Patron Saint of families, journalists, prisoners, the pro-life movement, the chemically addicted, drug addicts.
PRAYER: Lord, You inflamed St. Maximilian with love for the Immaculate Virgin and filled him with zeal for souls and love for neighbor. hrough his prayer, grant that we may work strenuously for Your glory in the service of others and so be made conformable to Your Son until death. Amen 🙏🏾