Jesus once said that no one could have greater love than for someone to lay down his life for his friends. Jesus has always been a tough act to follow, but there have always been people willing to follow the example of Jesus, even to the extent of dying in someone else’s place.

One of the 20th century’s best known examples of this supreme sacrifice was a Polish priest named Maximilian Kolbe.

Born Raymond Kolbe in 1894 to a poor but deeply religious family in Russian-occupied Poland, he grew up always knowing about Jesus, demonstrated in the love of his parents, both of whom were lay members of the Franciscan order. Although Raymond was by all accounts something of a handful, when he was 12 years old everything changed.

It was about the time that he was confirmed into the Catholic church and took his first communion. While praying in church one day, Raymond was confronted with a vision of Mary, mother of Jesus Christ. In his own words:

"She came to me holding two crowns, one white, the other red. She asked if I was willing to accept either of these crowns. The white one meant that I should persevere in purity, and the red that I should become a martyr. I said that I would accept them both."

A year later, Raymond went into the Franciscan junior seminary at Lwow, Poland, a kind of school for young people interested into becoming priests. While he studied there, he often found himself wondering whether he would be better suited as a soldier rather than as a priest, but by the age of 16 he had decided that he was called to the priesthood after all.

He was ordained as a novice in the Franciscan order, and as is the practice, took a new name, Maximilian, after a famous Christian who had been killed for refusing to deny his faith more than 1600 years before.

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