"The love of the Immaculate is the most perfect love with which a creature can love God. With her heart then, let us strive to love the heart of Jesus more and more. Let this be our greatest work."

- St. Maximilian Kolbe

St. Maximilian with some of the 700 friars in Niepokalanow before the break of World War II.

St. Maximilian with some friars in Poland

The City of the Immaculate

    When he returned to Poland in 1919, as a young priest, he was assigned as professor for the Franciscan seminarians in Cracow. Because of his failing health and the contraction of tuberculosis, he was found unsuitable for the work. His superiors decided to entrust him the office of the confession. Far from helping him, the work weakened him more than was  expected and he was consigned to the sanitarium of Zakopane. But his zeal for souls, characterizing a true saint, was not intimidated by physical ailments. He rendered various spiritual services among his sick companions and incited them in the love of the Immaculate.

After having recovered from a long confinement--- a period of silence and purification, he was prepared to launch an apostolic endeavor so vast that never was it known in Poland to have such a grandiose enterprise--the "City of the Immaculate" (Niepokalanow). It all started with the humble beginning in his friary in Grodno. But the growing number of subscribers to his printing apostolate forced them to transfer to a donated land in Warsaw in 1927 and established the "City of the Immaculate." In this "city" so called because of the number of almost eight hundred friars working with the huge mass media apostolate. They lived heroic lives of poverty, of continuous prayer and voluntary penance. They were united with the same goal of evangelizing not only Poland but also of the whole world.

Day and night, the friars spent themselves in promoting not only Catholic doctrines but also the knowledge of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This in view of cultivating in souls the need for conversion and sanctification both in the individual and collective levels via the mediation of the Immaculate. For Fr. Maximilian Mary, sanctification always necessitated the mediation of the Immaculate because for him, only through her and by means of her, the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier of souls acts in an inseparable way to an individual soul whether he acknowldges Mary's presence or not. But for Kolbe, the more a soul acknowledges and is conscious of Mary's important role in the economy of salvation, the surest, the fastest and the easiest that soul can become a saint via consecration to her. But few would probably be aware  of this wonderful "elevator" (i.e., the Immaculate) to sanctity if there are few workers letting her known and loved. This was the over-consuming theological and spiritual assumption of Kolbe's apostolic enterprise. That is why, he launched himself to work on all licit  means to hasten this goal. Apart from his principal publication, the monthly magazine "Rycerj Niepokalanej"  (Knight of the Immaculate) which reached its peak of 600, 000 copies per issue, he also had daily newspaper, the "Maly Dziennik" which eventually reached a circulation of one million. Other books, magazines and pamphlets for all walks of life were circulated for free. But what could be the secret of the progress of Kolbe's work? He himself pointed to the friars that true progress of Niepokalanow does not consist  in walls being increased, of machinery being multiplied and of publications augmenting in subscribers. It consists, rather, in the daily deepening of one's love for the Immaculate. The success of the work is brought about by Mary's mediation and assistance. She, who seeing the profound love of the soul for her, would eventually pay that love by her in return; thus generating as a product of these two loves (i.e., the soul's and the Immaculate's), the birth of Jesus in so many souls. This is Kolbe's dynamic principle of action and reaction.