St. Maximilian Kolbe
Patron of prisoners, families, journalists, the pro-life movement, those in addiction
Saint Maximilian Kolbe (1894–1941), Polish Franciscan and founder of the Militia of the Immaculate, ran the largest religious publishing house in Europe at Niepokalanów (the 'City of the Immaculate') and a mission press in Nagasaki — providentially placed on a hillside that the atomic bomb of 1945 would spare. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 he was sent to Auschwitz as prisoner 16670. When a fellow prisoner was selected for the starvation bunker after an escape, Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place: 'I am a Catholic priest; I have no wife or children.' He died of an injection of carbolic acid on 14 August 1941. The man whose place he took, Franciszek Gajowniczek, lived to be present at his canonization in 1982.