Who was St. Maximilian Kolbe?
Maximilian Kolbe was born in 1894 at Zduńska Wola, in what is now Poland. He entered the minor seminary of the Conventual Franciscans, took the habit at sixteen and was ordained a priest at twenty-four, in 1918; he also earned doctorates in philosophy and theology. The enemy he saw was indifference. Franciscan Media says he judged religious indifference "the deadliest poison of his day." Against it he founded the Militia of the Immaculata, a movement that fought evil through "the witness of the good life, prayer, work, and suffering," and a magazine, the Knight of the Immaculata. He built Niepokalanów, the "City of the Immaculata," a friary and printing house that Franciscan Media says grew to house some seven hundred friars. In the 1930s he went to Japan and founded a second such city in Nagasaki.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Niepokalanów was bombed, and Kolbe and his friars were arrested and released after about three months. He was arrested again in February 1941, Vatican News says for aiding Jews and the Polish underground, and sent to Auschwitz as prisoner 16670. He was given humiliating work and beaten for continuing his priestly ministry and his charity to the other prisoners.
In late July 1941 a prisoner escaped from his block. In reprisal the deputy commander chose ten men to be starved to death. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, "My wife! My children!" Kolbe stepped out of line. Franciscan Media gives his words as: "I would like to take that man's place. He has a wife and children." The commander accepted. Gajowniczek said later: "Kolbe left the ranks, risking being killed on the spot, to ask the camp leader to replace me."
In the starvation bunker Kolbe led the others in prayer. Franciscan Media records that what the guards heard was singing, not screaming. After two weeks he was still alive; Vatican News says he alone was, Franciscan Media says four men were. The camp killed him with an injection of carbolic acid on August 14, 1941. He raised his arm for the needle and said "Ave Maria." His body was burned the next day, the feast of the Assumption.
Why Catholics pray to St. Maximilian Kolbe for addiction, forgiveness and protection
Paul VI beatified him in 1971 and called him the "martyr of love." John Paul II canonized him in St. Peter's Square on October 10, 1982, with Franciszek Gajowniczek in the crowd, and declared that he was to be venerated from then on "also as a Martyr." "Death suffered for love, in place of the brother," the pope said, "is a heroic act of man."
His patronage of people with addictions is traditional, not decreed, and it arose from the way he died. He was killed by a needle. The Conventual Franciscans of the Province of Our Lady of Consolation write that he "is considered the patron saint of families, journalists, prisoners, drug-addicts, and the pro-life movement," and Franciscan Media lists him for addicts and for recovery from drug addiction. None of these is a papal naming. They grew from people who looked at his arm held out for the injection and saw their own, and asked him to stand with them.
That is why people in recovery pray to him. He knew what it was to be locked in a place where the body is taken apart a little each day, and he did not stop praying. His companions sang. His whole life before the camp was a fight against indifference, the quiet giving-up that addiction lives on. And he is a saint of forgiveness because he did not curse the men who killed him. One of his own sayings, which Benedict XVI recalled at a general audience in August 2008, puts it plainly: "Hate is not a creative force: only love is."
Families and prisoners pray to him for the same reason Gajowniczek did: he gave a father back to his children. Journalists pray to him because he ran a press and used it for God. Those who work to protect the unborn have taken him as patron because he gave his life so that another could live, and did not ask whether the man deserved it.
How to pray to St. Maximilian Kolbe
His memorial is August 14, the day of his death, and it is kept in every parish of the Roman Rite. The nine days before it, August 5 to 13, are the time for a novena, and the novena ends as the Church turns to the Assumption on August 15, the day his body was burned. In the United States the Conventual Franciscans keep a shrine to him at Marytown in Libertyville, Illinois.
Say the prayer below. Kolbe's own rule was simple: Mary first, and everything through her. If you can, add a decade of the rosary. Pair the prayer with Confession and the Eucharist; his priestly ministry in the camp cost him beatings, and he did not stop. If you are praying for someone else, a son in prison, a daughter who is using, pray it in their name and say the name out loud.
If the trouble is addiction, prayer goes alongside treatment, a recovery program, a sponsor, a counselor or a doctor; it never replaces them. Kolbe did not survive Auschwitz by praying. He died there, praying. What prayer gave him was the strength to stay human and to keep the men around him human for two more weeks. Ask him for that, for today.