SAINT OF DACHAU

 

Unlike our previous saints for Lent, ST. TITUS BRANDSMA was not Polish. He was born Anno Sjoerd Brandsma to Titus Brandsma and his wife Tjitsje Postma at Oegeklooster, near Hartwerd, in the Province of Friesland in 1881. His parents, who ran a small dairy farm, were devout and committed Catholics, a minority in a predominantly Calvinist region. With the exception of one daughter, all of their children (three daughters and two sons) entered religious orders.

 From age 11, the future saint was educated at a preparatory school for boys who were studying for the priesthood. He joined the Carmelite novitiate in 1898, taking the name Titus in honor of his father.

In the years following his 1905 ordination, he received a doctorate in philosophy and initiated a project to translate the works of St Teresa of Avila into Dutch. One of the founders of the Catholic University of Nijmegen, he served as a professor of philosophy and the history of mysticism at the school. While there he was known more for his availability to faculty and students than for his academic achievements. He later served as rector magnificus (1932–33).

 In 1935 he traveled for a lecture tour of the United States and Canada, speaking at various institutions of his order. On the occasion of his visit to a Carmelite seminary in Niagara Falls, Ontario, he wrote of the falls that "I not only see the riches of the nature of the water, its immeasurable potentiality; I see God working in the work of his hands and the manifestation of his love.”

 Working as a journalist, Father Brandsma served as ecclesiastical advisor to Catholic journalists. His long-standing opposition to Nazi ideology came to the attention of the Nazis when they invaded the Netherlands in 1940. In direct opposition to the Third Reich, the Conference of Dutch Bishops sent a letter ordering Catholic newspaper editors not to print Nazi propaganda. Father Brandsma was arrested while hand delivering the letter in January 1942. After being imprisoned in several other facilities, in June he was taken to the Dachau camp in Germany.

During his brief time at Dachau Father Brandsma was well-known for his kindness and spiritual support of other prisoners. His death on July 26, 1942 was a result of the Reich’s program of medical experimentation on prisoners. He gave a wooden rosary to the nurse who administered the fatal injection. She later became Catholic and testified to his holiness. In recent years St. Titus has been honored by both the cities of Nijmegen and Dachau. He was beatified in 1985, and canonized in 2022.

In 2005, St. Titus was chosen by the inhabitants of Nijmegen as the greatest citizen to have lived there. A memorial church dedicated to him now stands in the city.

 The saint’s studies on mysticism was the basis for the establishment in 1968 of the Titus Brandsma Institute in Nijmegen, dedicated to the study of spirituality. It is a collaboration between the Dutch Carmelite friars and Radboud University Nijmegen.

 In his biography of St. Titus, The Man behind the Myth, Dutch journalist Ton Crijnen claims that the saint's character consisted of some vanity, a short temper, extreme energy, political innocence, true charity, unpretentious piety, thorough decisiveness, and great personal courage.

His ideas were very much those of his own age and modern as well. He offset contemporary Catholicism's negative theological opinion about Judaism with a strong disaffection for any kind of antisemitism in Hitler's Germany.