The Virgin presented two crowns

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, a 20th-century Polish priest and martyr, was born into a modest and deeply religious family. As a child, he could be a bit naughty at times, which made his mother exclaim one day in desperation: "My poor child, what will become of you?" This remark deeply troubled him.

Shortly after, he had a life-changing encounter with the Virgin Mary. He later told his mother: "I often prayed to Our Lady and asked her to tell me what would become of me. Then she appeared to me holding two crowns, one white and the other red. She looked at me with love and presented them to me. The white one meant that I would always be pure and the red one that I would die a martyr. I accepted them both!"

On February 17, 1941, the Gestapo police arrested Father Maximilien Kolbe and four other brothers and took them first to Pawiak prison in Warsaw. Fr. Kolbe was violently beaten for being both a religious and a priest. He wrote to his Franciscan community in Niepokalanow, the Polish monastery he had founded: "The most loving Immaculate Mother has always surrounded us with tenderness and will always watch over us. Let us allow ourselves to be led by her, more and more perfectly, wherever she wants, according to her good pleasure, so that, fulfilling our duties to the end, we can, out of love, save all souls." A few days later, Father Kolbe was transferred to the Auschwitz camp where he died as a martyr on August 14, 1941.

The Marie de Nazareth team