Novena to St. Maximilian Kolbe

Maximilian Kolbe was born Rajmund Kolbe in Zduńska Wola, Poland, in 1894, entered the Conventual Franciscans as a young man, and was ordained a priest in Rome in 1918. He founded the Militia Immaculatae, a movement of Marian devotion, and built it into a large publishing apostolate at Niepokalanów, near Warsaw, producing a popular Catholic magazine and, for a time, running one of the largest religious publishing houses in Poland — work that grounds his patronage of journalists and publishers. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he sheltered refugees, including Jews, at his friary until his arrest by the Gestapo in 1941 and deportation to Auschwitz. There, after a prisoner escaped and the camp commander ordered ten men selected for death by starvation in reprisal, Kolbe stepped forward and offered to take the place of a stranger among them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, a husband and father. He was placed in the starvation bunker and, after roughly two weeks, was killed by lethal injection on August 14, 1941. He was canonized in 1982 by Pope John Paul II, who declared him a martyr of charity, and Gajowniczek, who survived the camp, was present at the ceremony.

Biographical facts drawn from standard, widely corroborated hagiography and historical scholarship on Kolbe's life, the Militia Immaculatae and Niepokalanów publishing apostolate, his 1941 arrest and death at Auschwitz, and his 1982 canonization by Pope John Paul II, at which Franciszek Gajowniczek was present. No writing of Kolbe's own is quoted in this novena; his published works remain under copyright.