KOLBE, MAKSYMILIAN MARIA. – Marian writer and apostle, a Conventual Franciscan, born at Pabianica in Poland on 6 January 1894, died at Oświęcim (Auschwitz) on 14 August 1941, renowned for holiness. He studied in Rome (1912–19), earning a degree in philosophy from the Pontifical Gregorian University (1915) and in theology from the Theological Faculty of St. Bonaventure at the International Seraphic College of the Order (1919).
There, with the advice of his rector, Fr. Stefano Ignudi (q.v.), on 17 October 1917 he founded, together with six other confreres, the “Militia of the Immaculate” (q.v.), a pious union dedicated to perfect devotion and Catholic-Marian apostolate, widely spread throughout the world (about 2,100,000 members). Ordained priest on 28 April 1918, he taught theology for a few years in Poland, beginning in 1922 his prolific press apostolate with the magazine *Rycerz Niepokalanej* (“The Knight of the Immaculate”) in Cracow, then in Grodno (1923), and in 1927 at Niepokalanów (City of the Immaculate, 40 km from Warsaw).
In March 1930, with a special blessing from Pius XI, he went to Japan, founding near Nagasaki in May of the same year the second city or “Garden of the Immaculate” (Mugenzaia-no-Sono), along with the Marian-missionary bulletin in Japanese, *Seibo-no-Kishi*, which became widely circulated. Plans for similar Marian-missionary foundations in China, Korea, and India were hindered by extrinsic difficulties. From 1936 to 1939 he was again superior and director at Niepokalanów, which in 1938 housed 762 Conventual friars and was known as the largest religious community in the world. Well known in Poland, during the last war he was first deported to Germany (19 September–8 December 1939) and then definitively on 17 February 1941. His painful Calvary led from the Pawiak prison in Warsaw to the camp at Oświęcim (Auschwitz) on 28 May, where at the end of July he offered his life in place of a fellow prisoner, a father of a family condemned to death by retaliation along with nine others in the infamous German “bunker.” His death cell is today a site of pilgrimage. In 1948 the informative processes for beatification were begun.
