“Saint Maksymilian Kolbe: Knight of Mary Immaculate”
Drawn May 6th 2008

This picture was drawn as a gift for

Saint Max’s Feast day is August 14th.

Used this picture as a reference, and several photographs too: [link]

"Nie ma większej miłości od tej, gdy ktoś życie swoje oddaje za przyjaciół swoich."
“Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay his life down for his friend.” (John 15:13-14)

And "Rycerz Niepokalanej" is Polish for “Knight of Mary Immaculate”

I drew the Blessed Mother in the background for two reasons: One, because Saint Maksymilian had a great devotion to her and second, because when he was younger, Mary appeared to him in a vision and offered him two crowns, one red, the other white. She asked him which one he wanted. He said that he wanted both, then she smiled and disappeared. He later told his mother about it and she realized that the red crown symbolized martyrdom and that the other represented purity.

The red roses in the crown of martyrdom represent blood shed for Christ and the thorns represent suffering. With the crown of purity I chose lilies to represent purity.

Raymond Kolbe was born in Poland on January 8, 1894. In 1910, he entered the Conventual Franciscan Order. In 1912 Kolbe went to Rome, where he studied theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University. In 1917 he founded the sodality (devotional association) of the Militia of Mary Immaculate, and was ordained a priest in 1918, taking the name Maximilian.
During the 1920’s Father Kolbe built a friary just west of Warsaw, the City of Mary Immaculate (Niepokalanów), which eventually housed 762 Franciscans. It became Poland’s chief Catholic publishing complex, printing eleven periodicals including a daily newspaper, The Little Daily, with a circulation of 230,000 and a monthly journal, The Knight of Mary Immaculate (Rycerz Niepokalanej), with a circulation of over one million. To better “win the world for the Immaculata,” the friars utilized the most modern printing and administrative techniques. This enabled them to publish countless catechetical and devotional tracts. Father Kolbe served both as superior of the City of Mary Immaculate and director of the publishing complex. Father Kolbe soon added a radio station and planned to build a movie studio.
After travel to Asia, where he founded similar friaries in Nagasaki and India, and envisioned similar missionary centers worldwide, Father Kolbe was recalled in 1936 to supervise the original friary near Warsaw. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he knew that his monastery would be seized, and sent most of the friars home. The Gestapo ransacked the City of Mary Immaculate and arrested Father Kolbe with about 40 other friars. They were sent to a holding camp in Germany, then to one in Poland.
On December 8, 1939, the Gestapo released Father Kolbe. He returned to the City of Mary Immaculate, where he and the other friars began to organize a shelter for three thousand Polish refugees, including two thousand Jews. The friars shared everything they had with the refugees. They housed, fed and clothed them, and brought all their machinery into use in their service.
Father Kolbe’s sheltering of these two thousand Jews aroused the Nazis to full fury. To incriminate him, the Gestapo permitted one final printing of the “Knight of Mary Immaculate” in December of 1940. It was in this issue that Father Maximilian wrote: “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?”
On February 17, 1941, Father Maximilian was again arrested, this time on charges of aiding Jews and the Polish underground. Gestapo officers who were shown around the whole monastery were astonished at the small amount of food prepared for the brothers. Father Maximilian was sent to the infamous Pawiak prison in German Occupied Warsaw, and was singled out for special ill-treatment.
On May 28, 1941 the Nazis closed the City of Mary Immaculate and took Father Kolbe, with four of his companions, to Auschwitz, where he died.
At Auschwitz, after a prisoner escaped, the Nazis chose ten men to be killed. When Franciszek Gajowniczek, protested that he had a wife and children, Father Kolbe stepped forward and offered to replace Gajowniczek among those killed. Father Kolbe was thrown into a starvation bunker, where he taught the Catholic faith to the others in the bunker and prayed with them as they died one by one. After two weeks, Father Kolbe remained alive. Finally, on August 14, 1941 the Nazis injected phenol into his veins, killing him at last. Franciszek Gajowniczek survived and told the story of Father Kolbe’s heroic sacrifice to everyone he could until his death in 1997.
Father Maximilian was a fervent advocate of devotion to the Virgin Mary and a ground-breaking theologian. His insights into the Immaculate Conception anticipated the Marian theology of the Second Vatican Council and further developed the Church’s understanding of Mary as “Mediatrix” of all the graces of the Trinity, and as “Advocate” for God’s people.
On Oct. 17, 1971, Father Kolbe was beatified by Pope Paul VI, the first Nazi victim to be proclaimed blessed by the Roman Catholic church. On October 10, 1982, Pope John Paul II canonized him, proclaiming also that he was to be venerated as a martyr. St. Maximilian Kolbe is considered a patron of journalists, families, prisoners, the pro-life movement and the chemically addicted.
St. Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us!
Information about Maksymilian Kolbe from this site: [link]

Thank you Niuhuru for the polish translations!