Basilica of Niepokalanów

Image: Wikimedia Commons

West of Warsaw stands Niepokalanów, the City of the Immaculate, the Franciscan monastery founded in 1927 by Saint Maximilian Kolbe, which grew into one of the largest religious houses in the world, spreading devotion to Mary through its printing presses. Its basilica of Our Lady Mediatrix of All Graces, planned before the war, was built between 1948 and 1954 after Father Kolbe had given his life at Auschwitz on 14 August 1941, offering himself in place of a fellow prisoner, a father of a family. Raised to a minor basilica by John Paul II in 1980, it welcomes hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year around the feast of the martyr of charity, 14 August.