Most of us know how St. Maximilian Kolbe died. In August of 1941, at Auschwitz, he stepped forward to take the place of a stranger condemned to the starvation bunker, and the Church honors that act every year on his feast, August 14. Fewer know what he did in the twenty years before that, when he ran what we would recognize today as a media company.
He launched a magazine, Rycerz Niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculata), in January 1922 with a print run of 5,000 copies and almost no money. By the late 1930s it was printing more than 700,000 copies an issue. He built Niepokalanów, a friary outside Warsaw that grew to nearly 800 friars who set type, ran the presses, and handled subscriptions, and in 1935 he added a daily paper. In 1938 he secured a license for a radio station, SP3RN, and put Radio Niepokalanów on the air on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. He was studying television and sketching plans for a film studio when the Germans shut it all down.
He Never Separated the Enterprise From the Mission
“If Jesus or St. Francis were alive now, they’d use modern technology to reach the people,” he told his friars. St. Maximilian Kolbe did not run a printing business to fund an apostolate on the side; the business was the apostolate, and he pursued it with real excellence, chasing the fastest presses and newest transmitters he could get. He also cared for the men who worked for him—feeding, housing, and forming hundreds of them, which is its own lesson about who gets cared for first.
Where a Catholic Owner Starts
You are not being asked to build Niepokalanów. You are being asked to stop treating your company as neutral ground. Ask what your business already broadcasts, because it broadcasts something: how you speak to a frustrated customer, whether your employees’ families are considered when you set a schedule, what hangs on the wall of your lobby. “What you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops” (Mt 10:27) is not only about preaching. It can also be about refusing to keep your faith quiet in the one place where God has given you real authority.
St. Maximilian Kolbe wrote that only love is creative. He built presses and a radio tower on that conviction, and you can build a company on it.
Consecrating your business to the Sacred Heart formalizes that intention. Consecrate your company this year, then make sure the care your people receive is planned and budgeted for rather than left to whatever the week allows.