Even during the occupation, the veneration of near-saint Titus Brandsma started

Titus Brandsma is lonely in cell number 557 in the Oranjehotel in Scheveningen, just the way he wants it. It is January 1942 and the Frisian father takes his pen, addresses Jesus and closes: „I am happy in my sorrow, / Because I no longer know sorrow / But the most chosen fate, / That unites me with you, o God.”

Brandsma’s health is not good, he only weighs 54 kilos, but he accepts his suffering under the Nazis without complaint, carried by a rock-solid faith. The poem Being alone is smuggled out of prison and published during the war†

This Sunday Pope Francis canonized Titus Brandsma (Oege Monastery 1881 – Dachau 1942) in Rome. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1985 for his resistance to the Nazis. To be canonized also required a miracle that could be verifiably attributed to him alone.

That became the 2004 cure for an aggressive form of skin cancer of the American Carmelite Father Michael Driscoll, why his community prayed through Brandsma† Driscoll is still alive and will attend the canonization in Rome on Sunday.

Boundless faith in God

Brandsma’s life was not only remarkable for his resistance to the German occupier. He was an important figure in the Catholic Renewal, a movement that at the beginning of the twentieth century tried to find a place for the Church of Rome in a rapidly changing world. Like the labor movement and the Reformed, the Catholic section of the population in the Netherlands wanted to emancipate itself, and Brandsma played a prominent role in that process.

In their forthcoming intellectual biography van Brandsma, Inigo Bocken and Ineke Cornet (Radboud University) argue that Catholic emancipation had to be able to cope ‘with the excesses of liberalism, positivism and capitalism’. Brandsma aimed for an intellectual revival of his Carmelite order so that it could “take on its social role”.

Anno Sjoerd Brandsma had entered the Carmelite monastery in 1898 at the age of seventeen and was ordained to the priesthood in 1905. In 1923 he became professor at the Catholic University of Nijmegen (now Radboud University) founded in that year and in 1932 and 1933 he was rector magnificus. When the Germans invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940, Brandsma was not deterred. He simply read Holy Mass that day and then took a candidacy exam in college.

In the book Titus Brandsma, from hero to saint, which will be published these days, professor of the history of philosophy Christoph Lüthy writes that Brandsma went into battle with the Nazis with boundless faith in God and “an almost childlike naivete”. He opposed the interference of the authorities in Catholic education and was an important figure in the conflict that the Catholic press fought with the NSB.

Catholic media refused to accept advertisements from the Dutch National Socialists, despite pressure from the occupying forces to do so. Brandsma was resolute: editors that ‘appreciate the Catholic character of its newspaper’ had to ‘definitely refuse advertisements from the NSB. There is no other way. The limit has been reached with this.”

Lecture in Camp Amersfoort

At the beginning of January 1942, Brandsma was arrested by the Germans. He is said to have said shortly before: “Now I get what has been my portion, and what I have always desired. Now I will go to the cell and I will be a real Carmelite.”

During an interrogation at the Binnenhof in The Hague by SS-Hauptscharführer Paul Hardegen, he stated: “At all times there have been people who, if necessary, gave their lives as martyrs for the church.”

Mentally he may have been ready, but Brandsma’s body was not designed for the conditions under which he had to live in captivity. After his stay in prison in Scheveningen, he was transferred to Kamp Amersfoort, where he deteriorated further as a result of dysentery.

Legendary is the lecture that Brandsma gave here on Good Friday, April 3, 1942. Dressed in prison clothes that were much too large, he stood on an apple chest and spoke about the fourteenth-century Catholic mystic Geert Groote. The speech touched the audience, Lüthy said, “because of the parallels with their own fears, or because of the wise erudition and empathy that Brandsma radiated, or probably because of a combination of both.”

Brandsma eventually ended up in the Dachau concentration camp, where he died on July 26, 1942, probably of an inflammation of the intestinal mucosa. Through a nurse of a German cleric he still managed to receive communion and the anointing of the sick. He was cremated three days after his death.

The veneration of Brandsma already started during the occupation. The Catholic Church certainly did not come out of the war unblemished – Pope Pius XII’s actions regarding the persecution of the Jews are highly controversial – but there was no doubt about Brandsma’s actions.

The Dutch Church has therefore worked tirelessly for Brandsma’s canonization and the ultimate recognition of his sacrifice will follow on Sunday, when Pope Francis accepts him into the Martyrology Romanumthe list of saints and martyrs recognized by the Catholic Church.

Also read this article about the thousand canonizations of Pope John Paul II