Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe, Priest and Martyr

Rajmund Kolbe was born in 1894 at Zduńska Wola in Poland and joined the Conventual Franciscans as Maximilian. In 1917, while studying in Rome, he founded the Militia of the Immaculata, and in 1927 he set up Niepokalanów near Warsaw, a friary of hundreds of brothers that printed Catholic papers in vast numbers and later ran a radio station. From 1930 to 1936 he worked in Japan, founding a friary near Nagasaki. Arrested by the Germans in 1941, he was sent to Auschwitz. When a prisoner escaped and ten men were chosen to die of starvation, Kolbe offered to take the place of one of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, a father who survived the war. He was killed with an injection of phenol on 14 August 1941 and canonized in 1982.