“Saint Max” is Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the inspiration for SaintMax Worldwide. A native son of Poland and Franciscan priest, Maximilian pioneered the use of modern tools of communications to “win the world.” During the 1920’s and 30’s he acquired printing presses and taught his friars to publish numerous flyers, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 230,000 and a monthly magazine with more than one million readers. A true apostle of the mass media, Saint Max started a shortwave radio station and made plans to create a motion picture studio.

In the fall of 1939, Hitler’s German army invaded Poland, ransacked the monastery Father Maximilian founded near Warsaw called Niepokalanow ("City of the Immaculata”) and drove the friars who lived there underground. As the friars returned the monastery became a popular refugee camp for thousands of Poles and Jews seeking escape from Nazi persecution. For this reason, the friars soon came under suspicion by the Gestapo. They harassed, arrested and released Kolbe who did not heed their warnings.

In February of 1941, the Nazis again arrested Father Maximilian and imprisoned him in Warsaw before transferring him to the notorious Auschwitz death camp. That summer a man escaped and the commandant announced ten prisoners men would die in a show of force and retaliation. One of the condemned, Polish Sergeant Francis Gajowniczek, begged for his life to be spared because he knew his wife and children could not survive without him. At that moment, Father Maximilian stepped forward and offered his life in exchange for that of his countryman. His death sentence was to be starvation, but the impatient captors ended his life with a fatal injection of carbolic acid on August 14, 1941.

Pope John Paul II canonized Maximilian as a "martyr of charity" in 1982. St. Maximilian Kolbe is considered a patron of journalists, families, prisoners, the pro-life movement and the chemically addicted.

I asked the Mother of God what was to become of me. Then 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.
                         -Saint Maximilian