St Titus Brandsma: Witness to Truth, Martyr of Love

Many know St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, the Carmelite martyr to Nazism, at least by her name in the world, Edith Stein. However, she was by no means the only Carmelite victim of National Socialism. On July 27, the dioceses of the Netherlands and the Carmelite family observe the feast of St. Titus Brandsma, OCarm, who died in Dachau on July 26, 1942, after receiving a lethal injection as part of the “medical experiments” performed at the concentration camp.

St. Titus was born Anno Sjoerd Brandsma in 1881 in a small town in the Netherlands province of Friesland, the next-to-youngest of six children born to a family of dairy farmers. His parents, especially his father, inspired in young Anno a love of Friesian culture and heritage, but more importantly, his parents were devout Catholics, unusual in the predominantly Dutch Calvinist north of the Netherlands. Eventually, five of his six siblings entered religious life. Anno became a Carmelite while still a teenager. As perhaps a sign of his closeness to his family, one might note that he took the same name as his father, Titus, when he made his vows.

He was ordained a priest in 1905 and earned a doctorate at the Gregorian University of Rome in 1909. Though his degree was in philosophy and he would teach the subject, most of St. Titus’s writings would be in spirituality, especially mysticism. These writings include an anthology of texts by St. Teresa of Avila, which he both compiled and translated into Dutch, articles on Dutch spiritual writers, and articles on Carmelite history. One can see these intellectual endeavors as part of a resurgence of Catholicism in the Netherlands in the early twentieth century.

As a touchstone of this resurgence, in 1923, Fr. Brandsma was among the founding faculty of the Catholic University of Nijmegen, which gave Catholics in the Netherlands access to higher education in a way they hadn’t seen since the Reformation. He even served a term as the Rector Magnificus (equivalent in the American system to a president or chancellor) for the university. He became proverbially well known for his availability to his students, concerned with their spiritual welfare as much as their academic progress. He would occasionally travel to lecture, especially on the subject of mystical theology, including a lecture tour in 1935 in the United States and Canada.

Fr Brandsma was also active in Catholic journalism in the period between the two World Wars. He founded and was for many years the editor of a magazine on Carmelite spirituality and history for a general Catholic audience. He worked tirelessly writing articles for both Catholic and secular publications—the institute preparing the edition of St. Titus’s collected works gives a count of over 700 articles published during his lifetime. And in 1935 (shortly after his lecture tour), he was appointed the ecclesiastical advisor to the association of Dutch Catholic journalists.

His activities, both as a journalist and an educator, were what would get him into trouble. Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940. Within a week, the army had surrendered, and the Nazis were in control of the Netherlands. As a believing and vocal Catholic, Fr. Brandsma would come into conflict with the regime, sooner or later. He had been a strong advocate for peace between the nations. He had an interest in ecumenical dialogue and even supported the Esperanto movement as a means of communication between peoples. Even as the Nazis occupied his homeland, he advocated for freedom of the press and freedom of education for both Catholics and Jews.

On December 31, 1941, Fr. Brandsma met with the Archbishop of Utrecht as head of the Catholic bishops of the Netherlands and received from him a letter, likely drafted with his help. This letter instructed the editors of the country’s Catholic publications to refuse to print any Nazi ads or propaganda, or they would no longer be permitted to call themselves Catholic. Such a document, of course, could not be entrusted to the mail service at the time, so the bishops entrusted copies to Fr Brandsma to deliver in person. He had visited 14 editors before his mission leaked to the Nazis, and he was arrested on January 19, 1942.

For seven weeks, the Nazis held him in a prison in the Netherlands. Though conditions were stark, he still had his breviary, and he took comfort in the prayers of the Church. He was questioned repeatedly, courteously at first, with the Nazis trying to find out more information about the Dutch hierarchy’s opposition to Nazism. He always responded to the questions with a clear articulation of Catholic truth.

In March, the Nazis shipped him to a new prison within the Netherlands, dressing him in a used soldier’s uniform marked with a red triangle that designated him as a political prisoner. Though outward expressions of religion were forbidden in this camp, Fr Brandsma found a way to bless and encourage the other prisoners here, including holding an impromptu meditation service on Good Friday, April 3, where he tried to help his fellow prisoners see a connection between their own situation and the sufferings of Christ.

In May, he was sent to Germany, first to a prison camp in Kleve, and in June to Dachau. Even in this living hell, Fr Brandsma endeavored to remain as cheerful as he could, encouraging his fellow prisoners, until the work and the harsh conditions broke him down. Near the end of the month, he collapsed and was brought to the camp “hospital,” infamous for the medical experiments conducted on the inmates. Even there, he prayed for his captors, telling the nurse who would administer the lethal injection that he would pray for her. He gave her his rosary before he died on July 26. Three days later, his body was burned in the camp crematorium.

The woman who had been his nurse later repented and would be a witness (anonymously) for St. Titus’s canonization process. Pope John Paul II beatified him on November 3, 1985, noting specifically in his beatification homily that his entire life, from his childhood in a loving Catholic home through his life as a Carmelite with its ardent mix of contemplation and action, has prepared him for his final witness even within a Nazi death camp. “In the midst of the onslaughts of hatred, he was able to love—everybody, including his tormentors: ‘They too are children of the good God’, he said, ‘and who knows whether something remains in them…’.” Pope Francis canonized him with nine other saints (including Saints Charles de Foucauld and Devasahayam Pillai) on May 15, 2022.

Because he is a saint who worked in journalism in the modern sense (and not just a spiritual writer like St Francis de Sales), some Catholic journalists hope for St. Titus Brandsma to be named the patron saint of journalists. Yet I think there are many lessons to be learned from his life, even if one is a journalist. Perhaps the most important lesson is for Christians to live an integrated life. Our world, even more than St Titus’s, tends towards fragmentation. We tend to separate what happens in Church on Sunday from what happens at work on Monday and from what happens in our free time on Saturday. As a Carmelite priest and educator, as a journalist and a martyr, St. Titus challenges all that. In him, the love of God and the love of neighbor—even the love of his enemies—could not be separated.

One of two options for the Carmelite Liturgy of the Hours on the Feast of St Titus Brandsma includes a sermon he preached on the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, July 16, 1939, on the occasion of a national pilgrimage honoring Sts Boniface and Willibrord. In that sermon, he draws many comparisons between the paganism of the age of those saints with the neo-paganism of his own day. Even before World War II started, what was St Titus’s answer to the Nazis? “Our age is not an age of half-hearted people; what is now especially required are not, in the first place, words, but deeds that agree with them, that bring them to life.” Our lives must be in harmony with our convictions. We must live by true Christian love, where love of God and love of neighbor are merely two modes of the same charity:

Even though the new paganism no longer wants love, we shall, with history in mind, still win over that paganism with love and not vanquish our love. Love will let us again win the heart of the pagans. Nature transcends dogma. Let the theory reject and condemn love, call her a weakness, the practice of life will always again make her be a power that wins over the hearts of the people and holds them captive. ‘Look, how they love one another.’  That saying of the pagans about the first Christians, the new pagans must again say about us. Then we will win over the world.

May St Titus Brandsma pray for us, so that we might all become such apostles and, if need be, martyrs of love.

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