Relic and prayer book of St Maximilian Kolbe, who was killed in Auschwitz on 14 August 1941.
St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan who was called “patron saint of our difficult century” by St. John Paul II on the occasion of his canonisation mass (10 October 1982). Having entered the order of Friars Minor Conventual as a young man, Father Kolbe founded the ‘Militia of the Immaculate’, a movement that had become very active among the rural and working middle classes of Poland, which had recently regained its independence. In 1922, Kolbe built the convent of Niepokalanów near Warsaw: the ‘City of the Immaculata’, which became a centre of spiritual and religious rebirth at a time of profound social and cultural transformation.

Despite his poor health, in 1930 Kolbe left as a missionary for Japan and India, feeling the challenge of communicating the Gospel where it had not yet reached. Back in Poland, he was arrested a few days after the German invasion. In 1941 Kolbe was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where on 14 August of that year, he offered his life in exchange for that of a family man, sentenced to death in the ‘starvation block’ in retaliation for the escape of a prisoner. At Auschwitz, a place that more than any other symbolises the abyss of 20th century evil, “a man died, but humanity was saved”, as Karol Wojtyła, then Archbishop of Krakow, wrote in 1976.

On 13 April 2015, in a ceremony presided over by Monsignor Marco Gnavi of the Community of Sant’Egidio and by Friar Marco Tasca, Minister General of the Friars Minor Conventual, the relics of the saint and a prayer book, with the following handwritten dedication from 1937, were handed over to the Basilica of St Bartholomew on the Island: “To Brother Jarosław. Mary. He who devoutly loves the Immaculata, will be saved, will become a saint and will lead others to holiness. Brother Maximilian Mary Kolbe”.