St. Maximilian Kolbe was a Franciscan friar, a writer, a missionary, and a martyr at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Born in Poland, the young boy Raymond experienced a vision of Mary offering the two crowns of purity and martyrdom; Raymond asked for both. Later having taken the religious name 'Maximilian,' he traveled to Japan for ministry, before returning to Poland to use the new printing presses to spread the Gospel.
In 1941, he was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo and given prisoner number #16670. He would go on to take the place of a fellow inmate doomed to die by starvation. He died by lethal injection on the eve of the Assumption of Mary, his life marked beginning and end by a devotion to Jesus through Mary.
St. Pope John Paul II declared Maximilian a saint in 1982.
St. Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us!
The Problem of Evil
During a visit to the remains of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Bishop Barron reflects on the problem of evil in this clip from his Catholicism series :