Novena to St. Maximilian Kolbe

St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe (1894-1941) was a Polish Conventual Franciscan friar, journalist, missionary, and martyr of Auschwitz — one of the most powerful witnesses of the twentieth century. Born Rajmund Kolbe near Łódź in partitioned Poland, he experienced a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary in childhood: she offered him two crowns, one white (purity) and one red (martyrdom), and asked which he would choose. He chose both. He entered the Conventual Franciscans at sixteen, was ordained a priest in 1918, and founded the Militia Immaculatae ('Knights of the Immaculate') in 1917, a Marian apostolate dedicated to the conversion of sinners and the spreading of devotion to the Immaculate Conception. He established Niepokalanów ('City of the Immaculate') near Warsaw in 1927, which grew into one of the largest religious houses in the world; the friars there published a mass-circulation Catholic monthly, Rycerz Niepokalanej ('Knight of the Immaculate'), that reached a million readers by the late 1930s. In 1930-1936 he served as missionary in Japan, founding Mugenzai no Sono ('Garden of the Immaculate') in Nagasaki — a friary that, against all expectations, survived the 1945 atomic bombing intact. Returning to Poland on the eve of World War II, he sheltered some 2,000 Jewish refugees at Niepokalanów. He was arrested by the Gestapo on February 17, 1941, and transferred to Auschwitz on May 28, 1941 as prisoner number 16670. In July 1941, after a prisoner escaped from Block 14, the camp commander selected ten men to die of starvation in retaliation. One of the chosen, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out in anguish for his wife and children. Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take Gajowniczek's place. The exchange was permitted. Kolbe spent two weeks in the starvation bunker leading the other condemned men in prayer and song; he was the last to die, killed by lethal injection on August 14, 1941, the eve of the Assumption. Pope St. John Paul II — himself a Pole who lived through the same Nazi occupation — canonized Kolbe as 'martyr of charity' in 1982, declaring him 'the patron saint of our difficult century.' Franciszek Gajowniczek survived the war and lived until 1995, testifying for fifty-three years to the man who died in his place. St. Maximilian Kolbe is patron of prisoners, journalists, families, the pro-life movement, and those addicted (especially drug-addicted).