Saint Titus Brandsma

Saint Titus Brandsma was a Dutch Carmelite, priest, professor, and journalist. For his opposition to National Socialism he died as a martyr in the Dachau concentration camp. The Church commemorates him on July 26.

He was born on February 23, 1881, on the Oegeklooster farm near Bolsward in Friesland and was baptized Anno Sjoerd. He was the fifth of six children in a deeply Christian family; five of them chose religious life. The Franciscans did not accept him because of his poor health. In 1898 he entered the Carmelites at Boxmeer and took his father’s name, Titus. He was ordained a priest on June 17, 1905, in ’s-Hertogenbosch.

He studied philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and received his doctorate in 1909. After his return he taught at the Carmelite house of studies in Oss and began publishing the works of Saint Teresa of Jesus in Dutch. From 1923 he taught philosophy and the history of mysticism at the new Catholic University of Nijmegen, and in the academic year 1932/1933 he was its rector. He was committed to the ecumenical movement and defended the Jews. He used to say that prayer is life, not an oasis in the desert of life.

In 1935 Archbishop Johannes de Jong appointed him ecclesiastical assistant to the Catholic journalists. After the Germans occupied the Netherlands in 1940, he openly rejected Nazi ideology. The occupiers demanded that the Catholic press spread their propaganda, and the Dutch bishops opposed this. In the first days of January 1942 Father Titus traveled to the editorial offices, conveyed the bishops’ instructions, and encouraged the editors not to give in to pressure.

After returning to Nijmegen he was arrested on January 19, 1942, and imprisoned at Scheveningen. In a written statement he upheld his position and ended it with a plea that God bless the Netherlands and Germany and that the two nations soon live in peace again. In his cell he wrote meditations on the Way of the Cross, chapters of a life of Saint Teresa, and a prayer before an image of Jesus. By way of Amersfoort and Kleve he reached Dachau on June 19, 1942. Of his tormentors he said that they too are children of the good God.

In Dachau he was put to work in the fields. Exhausted and ill, he was taken to the camp hospital, where on July 26, 1942, a nurse injected him with carbolic acid. Before that he had given her his rosary, and when she said she did not know how to pray, he advised her simply to repeat the words “pray for us sinners.” His body was cremated. The nurse later testified that she still remembered the face of the priest who had had compassion on her.

John Paul II beatified him as a martyr on November 3, 1985, in Saint Peter’s Basilica. After the healing of a Carmelite suffering from metastatic melanoma was recognized as a miracle, Pope Francis canonized him on May 15, 2022, in Saint Peter’s Square, together with Charles de Foucauld and eight other blesseds.