St. Maximilian Kolbe

Who they were

Raymund Kolbe was born in Poland under Russian rule and took the name Maximilian as a Franciscan. He was, by any measure, an unusually energetic organiser: he founded a religious movement, ran a monastery at Niepokalanów that grew to several hundred friars, and published a magazine with a circulation in the hundreds of thousands. He spent years as a missionary in Japan and founded a monastery at Nagasaki, deliberately sited on a hillside that later shielded it from the atomic blast.

After the German invasion of Poland his monastery sheltered refugees, including some two thousand Jews. He kept publishing. He was arrested in February 1941 and sent to Auschwitz in May.

In July, after a prisoner was found missing from his block, the camp deputy commander selected ten men to be starved to death in an underground bunker as a reprisal. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out about his wife and children. Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place. The request was granted.

He led the men in the cell in prayer. After two weeks, he was one of four still alive, and was killed by an injection of carbolic acid on 14 August 1941. Gajowniczek survived the war and lived until 1995. He was present at Kolbe's canonization in 1982.

He is not an uncomplicated figure, and it is more honest to say so than to leave it out. Some of the publications he oversaw in the 1930s carried material hostile to Jews, of a kind common in Polish Catholic publishing of the period. That record sits alongside his sheltering of thousands of Jewish refugees in 1939 and his death in the camp. Both are documented, and readers encountering him for the first time should hear both rather than discover the second later and feel misled.

The cell where he died is now a shrine, with a single candle. John Paul II, who was Polish and lived through the same years, canonized him in 1982 and described him as a martyr of charity.

Why people turn to St. Maximilian Kolbe

Kolbe is invoked by people struggling with addiction and by prisoners, and neither patronage is about his biography in the usual way. He was not an addict. The association grew from what he did in the cell: he went into a place of confinement and deprivation voluntarily, on behalf of someone who could not get out of it, and he kept his dignity and his attention on other people while he was there. Recovery communities took that up. He is asked for by people who feel trapped in something they cannot get out of on their own, and by the families waiting for them.

How to ask their intercession

Name the person, including yourself if that is who it is. Ask him to pray for the next day, rather than for the whole of it, which is the unit recovery actually works in. If you are supporting someone whose addiction you cannot fix, he is also the one to ask for what you need in order to keep showing up.