| Blessed Titus Brandsma, O.Carm. | |
|---|---|
| Friar, Priest and Martyr | |
| Born | February 23, 1881 Bolsward, Friesland, Netherlands |
| Died | July 26, 1942 (aged 61) Dachau concentration camp, Bavaria, Germany |
| Honored in | Carmelite Order |
| Beatified | November 3, 1985 by Pope John Paul II |
| Major shrine | Titus Brandsma Memorial, Nijmegen, Netherlands |
| Feast | 27 July |
| Patronage | Catholic journalists, tobacconists, Friesland |
The Blessed Titus Brandsma, O.Carm., (Bolsward, February 23, 1881 – Dachau, July 26, 1942) was a Dutch Carmelite friar, Catholic priest and professor of philosophy. Brandsma was vehemently opposed to Nazi ideology and spoke out against it many times before Second World War.
Contents |
He was born Anno Sjoerd Brandsma at Bolsward, Netherlands in 1881. He entered the novitiate of the Carmelite friars on September 17, 1898, and took the religious name Titus by which he is now known.
Ordained a priest in 1905, Brandsma was knowledgeable in Carmelite mysticism and was awarded a doctorate in philosophy at Rome in 1909. He then taught in various schools in the Netherlands. Among his accomplishments was a translation of the works of Saint Teresa of Ávila into Dutch.
One of the founders of the Catholic University of Nijmegen (now Radboud University), Brandsma became a professor of philosophy and the history of mysticism at the school in 1923. He later served as Rector Magnificus. He was noted for his constant availability to everyone, rather than for his scholarly work as a professor.
Fr. Brandsma also worked as a journalist and was the ecclesiastical adviser to Catholic journalists by 1935. It was his fight against the spread of Nazi ideology and for educational and press freedom that brought him to the attention of the Nazis.
Brandsma's documentation on Middle Dutch mysticism was the basis for the current Titus Brandsma Institute in Nijmegen, dedicated to the study of spirituality.
He was arrested in January 1942, when he tried to persuade Dutch Catholic newspapers not to print Nazi propaganda (as was required by law of the Nazi German occupiers). He had also drawn up a Pastoral Letter read in all Catholic parishes, by which the Dutch Roman Catholic bishops officially condemned the German anti-Semitic measures and the deportation of the first Jews. In the Pastoral Letter, the Dutch Bishops also outlined Nazism as incompatible with Catholicism in its core ideology.
After this Pastoral Letter, the first ca. 3,000 Jews to be deported from the Netherlands were all Jewish converts to Roman Catholicism. Brandsma was transferred in February 1942 to the concentration camp Dachau on June 13, after being held prisoner in Scheveningen, Amersfoort, and Cleves. He died on July 26, 1942, by a lethal injection administered by a doctor of the Allgemeine SS, to whom he gave a rosary.
Brandsma is honored as a martyr within the Roman Catholic Church. He was beatified in November 1985 by Pope John Paul II. His feast day is observed within the Carmelite Order on 27 July.
In 2005, Brandsma was chosen by the inhabitants of Nijmegen as the greatest citizen to have lived there.
In his biography (2008, Valkhof) of Titus Brandsma, The Man behind the Myth, Dutch journalist Ton Crijnen claims that Brandsma combined some vanity, a short tempered character, extreme energy, political simpleness, 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 combined a very negative theological look upon Jewry with a strong disaffection of any kind of Antisemitism in Hitler's Germany.