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Be prepared for trials

Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan friar. He founded a monastery in Japan during the 1930s and during the Second World War he sheltered Polish refugees, many of them Jewish. He was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Auschwitz. In July 1941, ten men from his barracks were selected to be starved to death and Maximilian volunteered to take the place of one of them. After three weeks of dehydration and starvation, Kolbe and three others were still alive and he was finally murdered with an injection of carbolic acid. He is one of ten twentieth-century martyrs depicted above the Great Door of Westminster Abbey in London.

You must be prepared for periods of darkness, anxiety,

doubts, fears, of temptations that are sometimes very, very

insistent, of sufferings of the body and, what is a hundred times

more painful, of the soul. For if there were nothing to bear, for

what would you go to heaven? If there were no trials, there

would be no struggle. Without a struggle, victory would be

impossible, and without victory, there is no crown, no reward ...

So be prepared from now on for everything.

Maximilian Kolbe (1894–1941)