Today the Church honors St. Maximilian Kolbe on his feast day!
St. Maximilian Kolbe was a priest and martyr who gave his life at Auschwitz during the Holocaust in place of a stranger condemned to die. Even in a place built for despair, he chose love, leading his fellow prisoners in prayer until his final days.
This prayer asks for his aid for all those who are imprisoned, struggling, or in need of the grace to face life’s hardest trials with faith.
Join us in prayer as we seek the powerful intercession of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the martyr of charity, for courage and sacrificial love. If you are facing a difficult trial or feeling forgotten, let us pray together for the strength to endure.
St. Michael’s Lent is a 40 day period of prayer, fasting, and penance observed each year from August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, to September 29, the Feast of the Archangels.
This devotion traces back to St. Francis of Assisi, who kept it in honor of St. Michael, withdrawing to the mountain of La Verna to prepare himself through prayer and fasting. Near the end of that period, he received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ marked into his own body.
Franciscans have carried on the tradition since, treating these weeks as a season of renewed prayer and penance, offered in thanksgiving for St. Michael’s protection and in preparation for the feasts of fall.
St. Jane Frances de Chantal is the patron saint of forgotten people, widows, and parents separated from their children, and is invoked by those struggling with in-law difficulties.
Born Jeanne-Françoise Frémyot in Dijon, France, in 1572, she lost her mother as an infant and was raised by her father, a president of the Parliament of Burgundy, who gave her a strong education and formation in the faith.
At 21, she married Baron Christophe de Chantal, and the couple had a happy marriage and six children, though only four survived to adulthood. Tragedy struck nine years later when her husband died from a hunting accident. Widowed and grieving, Jane struggled to forgive the friend responsible, and for a time lived under the difficult authority of her demanding father-in-law.
During a Lenten sermon, she heard Bishop Francis de Sales preach on forgiveness, and his words moved her to pardon the man who had caused her husband’s death. Francis de Sales became her spiritual director, and together they founded the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary in 1610, a community dedicated to prayer and to caring for those other orders would not accept, including the sick and the elderly.
Jane spent the rest of her life building up the Visitation order, establishing dozens of convents across France. She died on December 13, 1641, in Moulins. She was beatified in 1751 and canonized in 1767. Her feast day is celebrated on August 12.
