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| History Of St. Maximilian Kolbe - Part I |
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Saint Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941)
"No one in the world can change truth. What we can do and should do is seek it and serve it when it is found. The real conflict is inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of concentration camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are victories on the battle-field if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?"
-- St. Maximilian Kolbe
Early Life
St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe was born January 8, 1894 at Zdunska Wola, near Lodz, in Russian Occupied Poland. The second son of devout parents who worked in a cottage weaving industry, he was baptized Raymond at the Parish Church.
Already proficient in virtue, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to him in 1906 A. D., about the time of his first communion. She offered him the graces of virginity and martyrdom and asked him which he wanted. Filled with zeal, he begged for both, and was filled thereafter with the most ardent desire to love and serve this Immaculate Queen.
St. Maximilian (First Row, First from Left) in the Parish Choir
at Pabiance, Poland, about the time of his first communion.
Under the Russian occupation, the family lived in poverty and the parents became Franciscan tertiaries. In 1907 Raymond joined the Order of Friars Minor Conventual at Lwow in Austrian Occupied Poland, where he took the name Maximilian, and in 1910 he entered the Franciscan Order. Afterwards, his parents separated and dedicated themselves to religious lives. His mother became a Benedictine and later a Felician lay sister, and his father a Franciscan until he left the Order to direct a bookshop at Czestochowa, the national shrine of the Blessed Virgin. After enlisting with Palsudski's patriots, Maximilian's father was wounded fighting the Russians, and as one of their subjects, was hanged as a traitor in 1914, aged forty-three.
St. Maximilian as a seminarian
at Rome (1917)
In 1912, after finishing preliminary studies at the junior seminary, Maximilian was sent to Rome, where he studied theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University. In 1917 on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the conversion of Alphonse Ratisbon, renowned anti-Catholic and agnostic of Jewish lineage, he was moved by divine grace to found a pious association of the faithful known as the sodality (i.e., devotional association) of the Militia of the Immaculate.
A significant contribution to the international Marian movement, the Militia was to be a loosely organized tool in the hands of the Immaculate Mediatrix for the conversion and sanctification of non-Catholics, especially those inimical to the Church. Its members consecrated themselves to the Blessed Virgin Mary, invoked Her daily for the conversion of sinners, and strove by every legal means to build up the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart throughout the world.
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