Probably anyone who has heard of St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe has heard of his heroic and saintly self-sacrifice.  Detained as a prisoner of war in Auschwitz during World War II, he volunteered to take the place of another prisoner, who was married and had children, who was to be starved to death along with nine others.  He suffered this horrible death cheerfully and even helped the other prisoners as they died off one by one.  Ultimately, the prison guards injected him to bring about his death, because they could not bear his supernatural serenity.  This story alone would make St. Maximilian memorable, yet before his imprisonment he had lived a remarkable life of apostolic zeal.

While still in his 20’s, Maximilian founded the “Militia Immaculatae” – Knights of the Immaculate Virgin Mary – to promote Catholic evangelization.  Like St. Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort centuries before him, he advocated total consecration to the Immaculate Virgin Mary: “To Jesus through Mary.”  Kolbecenter.org says, “The immediate stimulus for this movement was Maximilian’s desire to counteract the militant naturalism of International Freemasonry that year. He had personally witnessed Masonic activists blaspheming under the windows of the Vatican.”

This fact also makes St. Maximilian a saint needed in our times.  Even if Freemasonry as an organized system may be aging and dwindling like many organizations, still, the widespread, unquestioning acceptance of Freemasonic errors is a very corrosive evil in our days.  Indeed, one could say that the goal of Freemasonry has succeeded in that its formal organizations have become practically redundant.

St. Maximilian went on to publish a magazine, “The Knight,” that reached over a million subscribers a month, while the daily newspaper he founded reached 230,000.  He traveled to Japan to extend his missionary work and made use of the latest forms of communication in those days, including radio and television.  Consequently, he is a patron saint of journalists and media communications.

St. Maximilian’s tremendous apostolic zeal, rooted in his devotion to the Church and to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and his Christ-like suffering for the sake of another make him an especially suitable patron for a Confraternity of Third Order Franciscan Priests.