There are political regimes that are not content to regulate people’s actions according to law. They want to govern their words, their convictions, and their consciences as well: to determine what may be said, what must be left unsaid, and who has the right to speak at all.
The story of Maximilian Kolbe can be read from this perspective. Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan friar, executed at Auschwitz on August 14, 1941. The immediate reasons for his death are well known: after a prisoner escaped from the concentration camp, the Nazis selected 10 men to be condemned to death by starvation in reprisal. One of them was Franciszek Gajowniczek, a husband and father. Kolbe asked to take his place in order to save him. The request was granted. After nearly two weeks in the starvation bunker, Kolbe was still alive. On August 14, 1941, his executioners ended his life with a lethal injection.
There is one detail, however, that receives far less attention: why was Kolbe taken to Auschwitz in the first place? What moved the Gestapo to arrest him? Kolbe did not devote himself only to prayer and to spreading devotion to the Virgin Mary. He was a publisher, a journalist, a media organizer, and a man fascinated by the new communications technologies. Well ahead of his time, he understood that ideas need instruments capable of reaching millions of people if they are to take any real part in public debate.
At Niepokalanów, near Warsaw, he and his fellow Franciscans built one of the most important Catholic publishing centers in the Europe of that era. There he printed a small magazine called Rycerz Niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculate), which in some issues reached a circulation of one million copies. He experimented with radio and sought to use every medium the technology of his day placed within his reach. For Kolbe a printing press was not simply a machine. It was an instrument of freedom. Then one day an authoritarian government came to power in Germany, and in 1939 it invaded Poland.
The new occupying force understood perfectly well how important it was to control intellectuals, the owners of the means of communication, the news, the shapers of public opinion, and the networks that circulated criticism of the German regime. Beyond military control, authoritarian regimes need propaganda, censorship, and fear. They need to ensure that some words may be spoken and others may not; that certain questions stop being asked; and that the official lie ends up passing for reality.
Kolbe was arrested for the first time a few weeks after the invasion. Released in December 1939, he returned to Niepokalanów. His enormous publishing operation had been all but dismantled. He could have resigned himself to that. He did not. The friary where he lived took in the displaced and the persecuted — many of them Jews — while Kolbe tried to recover the ability to publish. After repeated efforts he obtained permission to do so. And he wrote about truth. In a country occupied by one of the most powerful propaganda systems history has known, a friar under Gestapo surveillance chose to speak of the one thing no totalitarianism will tolerate: the existence of a truth that transcends the games of power.
His publications and his protection of persecuted Jews placed him on the list of undesirables. On February 17, 1941, the Gestapo arrested him at the friary. He was imprisoned at Pawiak, and three months later he was sent to Auschwitz. There he ceased to have a name and became, like so many others, a number: prisoner 16670.
Freedom of expression is usually understood today as the right to voice opinions. That is certainly true, but it is not enough. Freedom of expression appears in its most radical truth when speaking has consequences. Defending freedom when everyone agrees is relatively easy. Its real worth is discovered when a word discomfits the powerful, when the dominant ideology is challenged, when propaganda is contradicted, or when the interests of those with the power to punish are threatened. At that point freedom stops being a constitutional abstraction. It becomes a personal decision.
And behind it lies something deeper still: freedom of conscience. The certainty that there is an interior space within the person that no state, party, army, or ideology has any right to enter in order to dictate what we must hold to be true. Kolbe was a religious man, obviously. His freedom cannot be understood apart from his faith. But the witness he offers spills past the boundaries of the Catholic Church. The question his life poses belongs to any society that hopes to remain free: what are we willing to lose in order to keep our right to express our convictions, our certainties, and our questions from being crushed?
St. John Paul II canonized Maximilian Kolbe in 1982 and called him a “martyr of charity.” Various associations of journalists, meanwhile, have embraced him as a patron of free communication. Kolbe understood that freedom of expression is, at bottom, a way of protecting freedom of conscience — and that conscience is only truly free when it is willing to pay the price of its freedom. On August 14 we remember the man who died to save a father of a family. At Auschwitz he gave up his life. Long before that, the same man had decided he would not give up his conscience.
This column originally appeared in Spanish at Exaudi on August 14, 2026. Translated and republished with permission from the author.
Image: “Stained Glass: Martyrdom of St. Maximiliian Kolbe” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by gashwin
Rodrigo Guerra López is the secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.
Originally from Mexico City, he graduated in philosophy from the Free Popular University of the State of Puebla, Mexico; he was then awarded a higher degree in university humanism from the Ibero-American University, Mexico, and a doctorate in philosophy from the International Academy of Philosophy of the Principality of Liechtenstein.
He has held the role of academic coordinator of the John Paul II Pontifical Institute in Mexico City and has served as professor of metaphysics, bioethics, and philosophy of law at the PanAmerican University, Mexico. In 2013 he held the Karol Wojtyla Memorial Lectures at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland.
From 2004 to 2007 he directed the Observatorio Socio Pastoral of the Latin American Episcopal Council. In 2008 he founded the Centro de Investigación Social Avanzada (CISAV), of which he is professor-researcher of the Division of Philosophy and member of the Consejo de Gobierno.
He is a member of the theological commission of the Latin American Episcopal Council and of the Pontifical Academy for Life, and is the author of numerous publications in the field of anthropology, bioethics, and social philosophy.
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