Titus Brandsma, the father who left his mark in Brabant, will be canonized on Sunday. A canonization does not happen very often, because according to the Catholic Church everyone who receives that status must also have a miracle to his name. Think about that today. What is the alleged miracle of Titus Brandsma? He was prayed for for the healing of an American father with an aggressive form of skin cancer and he got better.
You wouldn’t give him 80 if you could hear him like that on the phone. The American Father Michael Driscoll has a young voice and sounds amazingly fit. He has been living cancer-free for eighteen years.
From his hometown of Palm Beach, Driscoll vividly tells how he came across the story of Titus Brandsma in his high school days, who was deported on 19 January 1941 by the Gestapo from the Carmelite monastery in Nijmegen. Brandsma had expressed himself too much anti-German and had encouraged all Catholic newspapers not to run German advertisements.
Brandsma also refused to expel Jewish children from school, as ordered by the Nazis. After his arrest, Titus ended up in Dachau seriously weakened via a large number of prisons. There he was killed, most likely with an injection.
“In Rome I heard that they were looking for a miracle attributable to Titus.”
The story of Titus impressed the American Father Michael Driscoll. So much so that he made it part of his life. ”We built a new chapel in those years, with a picture of Titus Brandsma in the stained glass windows. I wrote an article about him in the magazine for priests and finally I was at his beatification in Rome in 1985.”
In Rome, Driscoll heard that they were also looking for a miracle to attribute to Titus so that he too could be canonized. What Driscoll didn’t know at the time was that he would play a leading role in it.
“I got a severe form of skin cancer in 2004, stage four and then five. I have been irradiated 35 times. It looked very bad to me. The bishop here in Palm Beach sent a letter to all the parishes asking them to pray for me. In the end, a lot of people did that for years to make sure I got better. They enlisted the help of Titus Brandsma. I actually only needed fifteen for canonization, but there were many more.”
“It’s not the relic that healed me, but the trust I have in God.”
Michael Driscoll himself always prayed to Brandsma. He did this with a relic of Titus, which he placed on his skin while praying. It was a piece of his habit, which had been cut into pieces and scattered during the beatification. “Of course it is not the relic that has healed me, but the trust I have in God. Otherwise it would just be superstition.”
Miraculously, Father Driscoll recovered from a severe form of skin cancer. His attending physician was also very surprised. Now, eighteen years after the onset of his illness, the priest is still doing very well.
Driscoll says with a laugh that he hoped they would hurry up with that canonization so that he could still experience it. After all, he is already 80. So that has worked. On Tuesday, the priest boarded a plane bound for Rome. On Sunday, Titus Brandsma will be canonized by the Pope on St. Peter’s Square.
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