Aug 14 - St. Maximilian Kolbe - icon by Br. Robert Lentz, OFM. Happy Feast Day St. Max

Aug 14 - “St. Maximilian Kolbe” © icon by Br. Robert Lentz, OFM. Happy Feast Day St. Max!

Maximilian Kolbe was a Franciscan friar imprisoned by the Nazi Gestapo at Auschwitz in 1941 because of his work as a Catholic publisher. Because he was a priest, he was treated with particular savagery by the prison guards and given the dirtiest, heaviest work. He ministered to his fellow prisoners, encouraging them to forgive their persecutors and to overcome evil with good. He constantly sacrificed himself for others to the point where a Protestant doctor later testified, "In Auschwitz, I knew of no other similar case of such heroic love of neighbor."

Several months after his imprisonment, a prisoner escaped, and the guards gathered ten innocent prisoners to die in reprisal. One of the men chosen was a married man with children. Maximilian asked to take this man's place, and the guards accepted his offer. With the nine other condemned men he was stripped of all his clothing and placed in a starvation bunker. At the end of two weeks, he was one of four men still alive. Because they needed the bunker for more victims, these men were injected with a lethal dose of carbolic acid. Their bodies were cremated the following day, August 15, the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.

In this icon, Maximilian wears the black Franciscan habit of the Conventual branch of the Order of Friars Minor. Over his arm he carries the jacket of his uniform in Auschwitz. The number on the jacket was the one assigned to him when he arrived, and the red triangle identifies him as a political prisoner. The man whose place he took survived the concentration camp and eventually returned to his family.

His feast day is August 14.

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