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The saints

St. Maximilian Kolbe

In the worst place on earth, a priest stepped forward and asked to die in another man’s place.

Feast: 14 August · 1894 to 1941 · The modern era · Poland and Auschwitz

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A photograph of Fr Maximilian Kolbe in 1936: a Franciscan priest with round glasses and a long beard.

Unknown author, 1936. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Home / The saints / St. Maximilian Kolbe

Auschwitz, 1941

Auschwitz: the place John Paul II called a site of terrible slaughter.1

The Nazis murdered about 1.1 million people there, about one million of them Jews.2

In the middle of it, one prisoner, a priest, makes an offer.1

“Father Maximilian voluntarily offered himself for death in the starvation bunker for a brother”

St. John Paul II at Auschwitz, 7 June 19791

He did not know the man. That was the point.

Patron of “our difficult century,” as St. John Paul II called him at Auschwitz1

01St. Maximilian Kolbe

A spiritual victory

St. John Paul II, praying at Auschwitz in 1979, said that in doing this Kolbe won a spiritual victory like that of Christ Himself.1

The Pope told the crowd that he had gone down many times to Kolbe’s death cell and knelt there.1

In a place built to make people into numbers, one man insisted on being a person, and treated a stranger as a brother.

02St. Maximilian Kolbe

Remembered

A photograph of Fr Maximilian Kolbe in 1936: a Franciscan priest with round glasses and a long beard.
Fr Maximilian Kolbe, photographed in 1936. Unknown author, 1936. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Jesus said there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.3

Live it this week

Take someone else’s hard thing

Kolbe stepped forward to die in place of a man he didn’t know. You can do a small version: this week, quietly take on one chore, shift or burden that belongs to someone more tired than you.

Notes

How we know · 3 sources for this page
  1. Pope St. John Paul II, Homily at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, 7 June 1979. Holy See, official English text. vatican.va
  2. encyclopedia.ushmm.org: “Auschwitz”. encyclopedia.ushmm.org. encyclopedia.ushmm.org
  3. John 15:13, World English Bible. read the chapter

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.