CONSECRATION PRAYER TO MARY BY SAINT MAXIMILIAN KOLBE

August 14: St. Maximilian Kolbe

“The Immaculate alone has from God the promise of victory over Satan. She seeks souls that will consecrate themselves entirely to her, that will become in her hands forceful instruments for the defeat of Satan and the spread of God’s kingdom”.

O Immaculata, Queen of Heaven and earth, refuge of sinners and our most loving Mother, God has willed to entrust the entire order of mercy to thee.

I, N___, a repentant sinner, cast myself at thy feet humbly imploring thee to take me with all that I am and have, wholly to thyself as thy possession and property.

Please make of me, of all my powers of soul and body, of my whole life, death and eternity, whatever most pleases thee.

If it pleases thee, use all that I am and have without reserve, wholly to accomplish what was said of thee: “She shall crush your head,” and, “Thou alone hast destroyed all heresies in the whole world.”

Let me be a fit instrument in thine Immaculate and merciful hands for introducing and increasing thy glory to the maximum in all the many strayed and indifferent souls, and thus help extend as far as possible the blessed Kingdom of the most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

For wherever thou enterest, one obtains the grace of conversion and growth in holiness, since it is through thy hands that all graces come to us from the most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

V. Allow me to praise thee O Sacred Virgin.
R. Give me strength against thy enemies.

SAINT MAXIMILIAN KOLBE

Maximilian Kolbe was born Rajmund on 8 January 1894 in Zduńska Wola, which was at that time part of the Russian Empire. Rajmund was the second son of Julius Kolbe and Maria Dabrowska. His father was an ethnic German and his mother of Polish origin. He had four brothers, two of whom died very young.

His parents moved to Pabianice where they worked first as weavers. Later his mother worked as a midwife (often without charge) and ran a grocery and household goods shop in part of her rented house. Julius Kolbe worked at weaving mills and also grew vegetables on a rented allotment.

In 1914 he joined Józef Piłsudski’s Polish Legions fighting for Poland’s independence from Russia and was captured. Regarded as a Russian subject, he was hanged as a traitor in 1914, aged forty-three.

In 1907 Rajmund and his elder brother Francis decided to join the Conventual Franciscans. They illegally crossed the border between Russia and Austria-Hungary and joined a Conventual Franciscan junior seminary in Lwów. In 1910 Kolbe entered the novitiate. He professed his first vows in 1911.

In 1912 he was sent to Kraków and then on to Rome where he took final vows in 1914, adopting the names Maximilian Maria, to show his veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In Rome he studied philosophy, theology, mathematics, and physics. He took a great interest in astrophysics and the prospect of space flight and the military.

While in Rome he designed an airplane-like spacecraft, similar in concept to the eventual space shuttle, and tried to patent it. In 1918 he was ordained a priest. He earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1915 at the Pontifical Gregorian University and a doctorate in theology in 1919 at the Pontifical University of St. Bonaventure.

During his time as a student, he witnessed demonstrations by Freemasons against Popes Pius X and Benedict XV. This inspired him to organize the Militia Immaculatae (Army of Mary) to work for the conversion of sinners and enemies of the Catholic Church, through the intercession of the Virgin Mary.

In 1919 he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis and returned to a newly independent Poland.

Here his main work was teaching Church history in a seminary. Another attack of tuberculosis was followed by the re-siting of his printing presses at Niepokalanow, near Warsaw.

Here Maximilian founded a Franciscan community which combined prayer, cheerfulness and simplicity of life with modern technology, as well as a seminary, a radio station and several other organisations and publications. He was also very active in promoting the veneration of the Immaculate Virgin Mary. His movement had its own magazine, Militia Immaculatae, in which he particularly condemned Freemasonry, Communism, Zionism, Capitalism and Imperialism. Not long after, the presses were moved to Grodno, circulation increased to 45,000 and new machinery was installed.

Between 1930 and 1936 he went on a series of missions to Japan, where he founded a friary on the outskirts of Nagasaki, a Japanese newspaper and a seminary. Because, against local advice, the friary was not built on the ‘propitious’ side of the mountain it was spared the devastation caused by the atomic bomb in 1945. After founding another community at Nagasaki in Japan, Maximilian was recalled in 1936 as superior of Niepokalanow, which grew to number 762 friars.

When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Kolbe, realising that his monastery would be taken over, sent most of the friars home, warning them not to join the underground resistance.

During the Second World War the friary provided shelter to refugees from Greater Poland, including 3,000 Poles and 1,500 Jews. Maximilian was also active as a radio amateur, attacking Nazi activities through his reports. For some time his newspapers continued publication, taking a patriotic, independent line, critical of the Third Reich.

Kolbe, who had refused German citizenship, was finally arrested on 17 February 1941 as a journalist, publisher and ‘intellectual’. Gestapo officers were shown round the whole friary and were astonished at the small amount of food prepared for the friars.

He was imprisoned in the Pawiak prison and on 25 May was transferred to Auschwitz I as prisoner #16670. In the camp the heavy work of moving loads of heavy logs at double speed was enforced by kicks and lashes. Maximilian also had to remove the bodies of those who died of torture.

At the same time, he continued his priestly ministry, hearing confessions in unlikely places and smuggling in bread and wine to celebrate the Eucharist. He was noted for his sympathy and compassion towards those even more unfortunate than himself.

In July 1941 a prisoner from Kolbe’s barracks vanished, prompting the deputy camp commander to pick 10 men from the same barracks to be starved to death in the notorious Block 13 as punishment for his escape. (In fact, he was found later to have drowned – deliberately? – in the camp latrine.)

When one of those selected, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out in distress at having been chosen, Maximilian volunteered to take his place. He stepped forward, saying: “I am a Catholic priest. I wish to die for that man. I am old; he has a wife and children.” During the days in the death chamber of Cell 18, he led his companions in songs and prayer. After three weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. He was finally put to death on 14 August 1941 with an injection of carbolic acid.

He was beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1971 and canonized on 10 October 1982 by Pope John Paul II, a former archbishop of Kracov, the diocese where Auschwitz was located. Among those present was Franciszek Gajowniczek, the man whose place Kolbe had taken.
Maximilian Kolbe is the patron saint of drug addicts, political prisoners, families, journalists, prisoners and the pro-life movement. Pope John Paul II also declared him the “Patron Saint of Our Difficult Century”

Kolbe is one of ten 20th-century martyrs depicted in statues above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey, London.

Franciszek Gajowniczek

He died on March 13, 1995, at Brzeg in Poland, 95 years old – and 53 years after Kolbe had saved him. But he was never to forget the ragged monk. After his release from Auschwitz, Gajowniczek spent the next five decades paying homage to Father Kolbe, honoring the man who died on his behalf.

In December 1994, the 94-year-old Pole visited St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church of Houston. His translator on that trip, Chaplain Thaddeus Horbowy, said: “He told me that as long as he . . . has breath in his lungs, he would consider it his duty to tell people about the heroic act of love by Maximilian Kolbe.”