The 7th of January 2019 is the 126th Anniversary of the Birth of St. Maximilian, the founder of the Militia Immaculatae.
On the 7th of January 1894 a second son was born unto Julian and Marianne Kolbe at their family home in Zduńska Wola, Poland. On that very day he was baptised in the church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and received the name Raymond.
Both his parents were weavers. Due to money problems they moved to Łódź and next to Pabianice, where the father worked in a factory. Raymond’s mother ran a little shop and besides worked as a midwife. Julian and Marianne Kolbe were both members of the Third Order Society of St. Francis.
Their threes sons (the eldest Francis, Raymond and Joseph the youngest) were taught at home.
Raymond was exceptionally intelligent and very gifted and endowed with a sanguine temperament.
He was often told off by his mother for his bad behaviour. She asked him one day with sadness and concern: „Whatever will become of you, my son?” His mother’s question so deeply impressed itself upon the ten year old boy’s heart that he began asking the Mother of God to tell him. Slowly he became more serious and prayed more often. His mother noticed the change that took place in her son and asked him for the reason. At first he did not want to tell her but finally yielded to her request and said: „When I was praying in the church in front of the Holy Mother’s picture, she stretched her hands out towards me. She held two crowns. In one hand a red one, in the other one a white one. She asked me which one do I wish to have. I chose both crowns.
The next turning point came in the year 1907 during the parish mission held by Father Peregryn Haczela, a franciscan from Lvov. He encouraged Raymond and his elder brother Francis to enter the Lower Seminary of the Franciscan fathers in Lwów. Raymond was outstanding in science. Mathematics and physics were his two most favourite subjects. Already then he would speak about the possibilities of space travel. He went so far as to present proof, with numbers and the laws of physics. That these were not mere youthful phantasies and dreams he showed in the year 1915, when he deposited a sketch of a „etherplan”, a vehicle to travel out of space, between planets. The construction was based on the principle of a three — pronged lifting rocket.
It was during his studies at the Lower Seminary that he came to the decision of offering himself to the service of Mary. He made his vows in the Lvov Cathedral before the miraculous picture of the Gracious Divine Mother, where king John Casimir Vasa had pledged the Crown of Poland to Mary, proclaiming her the Queen of his Kingdom. Father Maximilian thus wrote about his offering: „With my head bowed to the ground I pledged to the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, who reigns on the altar, that I would fight for Her. How? That I did not know, though I imagined a weapon combat”. However, he was aware that this would be impossible to achieve as a priest and therefore wanted to give up his spiritual vocation and become a soldier. His brother Francis cherished the same desire. They both decided to leave the Seminary and then their mother visited them and told them, that together with their father, she was going to dedicate her life to the service of God! Raymond understood this as a sign of God’s Providence that he should remain in the Seminary.
In 1910 he asked to accepted to the Franciscan Novitiate, choosing the name Maximilian. In the year 1912 he began his studies in Cracau (Kraków). After a few months he was directed to The International Seraphic College in Rome. On 1st December he took his perpetual Vows, choosing the name: Mary. In 1916 he achieved a PhD in philosophy at the „Gregorianum” University. A year later, still as a subdeacon, he founded The Knighthood of the Immaculata (Militia Immaculata)!
On the 28th of April 1918 he took his Holy Orders. He offered his first Holy Mass in the church of S. Andrea delle Fratte in Rome. He returned to Poland in 1919. Poland had just regained her independance. He desired for himself, for his spiritual brothers and for all humanity, only one form of dependance: to be a knight of Mary!
To come close to her, to become like her, to permit her to conquer our hearts and the whole of our beeing, that she should live and act in us and through us, that She should love God with our heart, that we belong to her implicitly for all eternity = that is our ideal.
