Martyr of Dachau: Blessed Titus

Brandsma’s Cause Moves

Forward
Anti-Nazi efforts by the Dutch priest saw him
imprisoned and killed for his Christian witness.

Blessed Titus Brandsma (photo: Public domain)

Brian O’Neel FeaturesJanuary 23, 2018
In 2004, Father Michael Driscoll, a Carmelite priest in Boca
Raton, Florida, underwent surgery for Stage 4-5 melanoma, a
type of skin cancer. The prognosis was not good. Doctors told
him this sort of cancer always returns.
Understandably concerned, he turned to a man he called his
“hero,” a Dutch Carmelite priest and scholar murdered by the
Nazis at Dachau, Blessed Titus Brandsma. Praying for the
diminutive friar’s intercession and touching a second-class
relic to his head, Father Driscoll hoped for the best.
Nearly 15 years later, the cancer has not returned.
A miracle? Maybe. As Father Brandsma’s canonization
cause’s vice postulator, Father Mario Esposito, told the Sun
Sentinel newspaper earlier this year, “There are very exacting
standards, and Rome is going to go over this case with a fine-
toothed comb.”
Nonetheless, “It appears there is no medical explanation for
his cure,” Father Esposito said.
And Dr. Anthony Dardano, an associate dean of Florida
Atlantic University’s medical school who helped prepare a
medical report for the Vatican says, “Is there a scientific
explanation for why he’s alive? No.”
The Register has exclusively learned that Father Esposito was
to take the report to Rome Tuesday and present the findings to
the Congregation for the Causes of Saints sometime this week.
If approved by the congregation’s medical commission and
accepted by the Holy Father, the miracle will qualify Father
Brandsma for canonization.
While considered one of history’s “Top 50 Dutchmen,”
Blessed Titus is practically unknown outside of Holland and
Carmelite communities (although Wikipedia, Dutch and
English, and the CarmelNet websites are a wealth of
information).
Born as Anno Brandsma in 1881 in northern Holland, his
parents, Titus and Tjitsje, were dairy farmers who made and
sold their own cheese from their herd of Holstein cows and
took their brood of eight to daily Mass. Although Catholics
made up just 5% of their native district of Friesland, the elder
Brandsma was a community leader and widely respected.
Anno knew his priestly vocation from childhood, so when it
came time for high school, he entered a Franciscan-run
secondary school for boys interested in becoming clergy.
Following graduation, the 5-foot-1-inch student entered the
Carmelite novitiate in 1898, took his first vows and the name
Titus after his father the next year, and received ordination in
1905.
After finishing doctoral work in Rome in 1909, he taught high
school until 1923, when he helped found the Catholic
University of Nijmegen.

Fighting the Nazis

By 1930, Father Brandsma had served as a priest for 25 years.
Two years later, he became Nijmegen’s rector, overseeing the
expansion of the school and building a priory for his fellow
Carmelites.
In the same year he became the university’s rector, Adolf
Hitler’s National Socialists came to power in Germany. As
Hitler grew in notoriety, so did concern about him.
Chief among such people in Holland was Father Brandsma.
He lectured, preached and wrote against Nazism. He rightly
identified it as a neo-pagan system, one that would ultimately
seek to subsume all religion, and ultimately Christianity, under
its dominion.
Less than one year after its decisive defeat of Poland,
Germany invaded Holland, on May 10, 1940. Fighting there
effectively ended just five days later.
Two factors put Father Brandsma on a collision course with
the now-occupying Nazis. In addition to the bishops having
made him spiritual adviser for Dutch Catholic journalists, they
had also made him president of the Union of Directors of
Catholic Schools. The press and schools were to prove
important battlefields between the Church, the occupiers and
the latter’s collaborators.
First came the schools. Shortly after taking over the
government, the Dutch National Socialists (NSB) demanded
information on every Jewish pupil in Catholic institutes.
Additionally, the Germans decided to cut the pay of priests
and religious who taught in schools by 40%. Next, the Nazis
demanded the removal of all Jewish students from parochial
institutions. Father Brandsma told headmasters to resist.
Simultaneously, the Dutch episcopacy ratcheted up pressure
on Catholics who cooperated with the occupiers, denying
some the sacraments. This enraged the Nazis, but they knew
they could not hit the bishops. Instead, they sought a
surrogate.
Shortly after the new year in 1942, they found one.
In December 1941, the government decreed the Catholic press
could no longer refuse to run NSB press releases or
advertisements on account of “principle,” which the Nazis
defined as ideology but which the Church saw as faith and
morals. Since two Church-run periodicals had already been
suppressed and another one was barely allowed to operate,
Father Brandsma saw the need for Catholic media to resist.
At the end of the year, he consulted with the head of the Dutch
bishops, who sent him to embolden the journalists. Over the
first two weeks of 1942, he crisscrossed the country, speaking
with his colleagues in the press. Observing these actions, the
secret police correctly conjectured Father Brandsma’s
objective and accused him to Berlin of “sabotage.”
Then, on Jan. 16, the Catholic press printed a pastoral letter by
the nation’s episcopacy condemning the Nazis’ tactics. In
response, on Jan. 19, the Germans arrested Father Brandsma.
The next day, as Nazi planners in the Berlin suburb of
Wannsee developed the “Final Solution,” Father Brandsma
began his interrogation under SS Hauptscharführer (Master
Sgt.) Hardegen of Gruppe IV (Church Affairs).
After an exhausting game of cat and mouse between the two
lasting several weeks, Hardegen understood that the priest
could not be turned. This essentially sealed his fate.
Reporting to Berlin, Hardegen wrote, “Brandsma is genuinely
a man of character with firm convictions. He wants to ‘protect
Christianity’ against National Socialism. He has written
against our policy toward the Jews. He is anti-Nazi in
principle and shows it everywhere. He does not deny any of
these things, but openly admits them. Thus he is to be
considered a ‘dangerous man’ and confined accordingly,” as
recounted in the book Titus Brandsma: Friar Against
Facism by Carmelite Father Leopold Glueckert.

Sent to Dachau
The Nazis shuttled Father Brandsma back and forth between
various prisons before Berlin finally decreed he be sent to
Dachau concentration camp, where it confined most clergy
political prisoners. He arrived June 19.
In the concentration camp, despite unrelenting pain caused by
his terrible health and abuse, Blessed Titus maintained his
inherent cheerfulness and optimism, as Joseph M. Malham
recounts in By Fire Into Light: Four Catholic Martyrs of the
Nazi Camps.
Because of this and because he was weak, the guards hated
him. One broke his glasses out of spite. His fellow prisoners
did what they could to help, but, ultimately, his condition
irreparably deteriorated.
Wasted by dysentery, lack of food and other maladies, Father
Brandsma had no option but to go into the camp’s hospital.
Far from being someplace to convalesce, it was actually where
the Nazis did medical experiments on prisoners who were
beyond all hope.
During his days in this place, he went from bed to bed offering
comfort to those who were in the same situation and heard
several confessions.
Watching all of this was a Nazi nurse of Dutch origin whose
job it was to give people lethal injections and who hated
religion, especially clergy. As she observed Father Brandsma,
she would sometimes mock him and religion. This prompted
him to engage her in conversation, asking why she hated faith
so much.
Not long before she killed him July 26, 1942, at 1:50pm, he
gave her his handmade rosary. He told her to pray, and when
she laughed at him, he simply told her again to pray.
Sometime in the 1950s, at a Carmelite community in
Germany, an aging woman presented herself to the friars,
wanting to talk. It was the nurse. She came asking forgiveness
for hastening Father Brandsma’s death. Later, at Blessed
Titus’ beatification in 1985, she was among the congregants.
As Father Esposito told the Register, “One of the things that
strikes one about Blessed Titus is that he incarnated
forgiveness. Even when people acting brutally to him, he
reacted with the supernatural virtue of charity.”
When asked what Father Brandsma teaches us today, Father
Esposito responded, “He’s worthy of people trying to know
something about him. When they say the Church was silent in
the face of Nazism, that’s just not true. He was part of those
voices who stood for the truth in times of real horror and
devaluation of human life and all that came with Nazism. His
commitment to principles and Christian life are worthy of
reflection and veneration.”
Register correspondent Brian O’Neel writes from Quarryville,
Pennsylvania.
Keywords: nazis martyrs heroic priests brian o'neel blessed titus brandsma

Brian O’Neel Brian O'Neel writes from Coatesville,

PA.