Religion: The Angel of Auschwitz

Poland's Maximilian Kolbe is declared a Catholic saint

"Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Repeating those words of Jesus (John 15:13), Pope John Paul II last week presided over the canonization of a fellow Pole who greatly inspired his own vocation as a priest: Maximilian Maria Kolbe, a Franciscan friar who died for his faith—and to save another man's life—at the most notorious of Nazi death camps.

At the end of July 1941, a commandant at Auschwitz arbitrarily selected ten men to be starved to death in reprisal for the escape...