My Thoughts 27/07/2022

I was very familiar with the face of Titus Brandsma as his portrait hung in the conference room at Aylesford Priory. He seems a kindly studious figure but it was only when he was canonised a saint on the same day as Charles de Foucauld this year that I appreciated his significance.

He was a Carmelite friar, a journalist, and a professor of philosophy and of the history of mysticism at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. When Germany invaded the Netherlands early in the Second World War he issued guidelines to the Dutch Catholic Press telling them that newspapers could not carry Nazi propaganda or advertisements and still call themselves Catholic.

He was arrested shortly afterwards and spent several months in various prisons. He eventually ended up in the consecration camp at Dachau, in Bavaria where he was regularly beaten. His health broke down and was sent to the hospital. There a number of inhumane medical experiments were carried out on him before he was put to death by lethal injection on 26th July 1942.

It is said that the nurse who gave the injection was Dutch and lapsed Catholic, and Titus tried to persuade her back to the Faith. She refused to pray, but he gave her his rosary, saying “Surely you can say, “Pray for us sinners?” After the war she did return to the praise of her faith and she gave evidence that he accepted death with the words, “Not my will, but thine be done.”

Here is a prayer to Saint Titus Brandsma

God of peace and justice,
you open our hearts to love
and to the joy of the Gospel
even in the midst of countless forms of violence
that take away the dignity of our brothers and sisters,
fill us with your grace,
so that like Saint Titus Brandsma,
we may in tenderness see beyond the horrors of inhumanity and contemplate your glory
that shines forth through the martyrs of every age,
and so become your authentic witnesses in the world of today.
Amen.