IN OUR OWN 20TH CENTURY, MARTYRS HAVE RETURNED

The unusually large numbers of beatified and canonized martyrs of the 20th century is remarkable. They are among the countless thousands who suffered and died for their faith in that century.

These martyrs were special to John Paul II. They were contempary to his life and to many of us. He often exclaimed: “Their witness must not be forgotten”. He saw them and all martyrs as an inestimable treasure and resource for the Church. St. Paul calls them: “the great cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12,2).
What explains John Paul II’s intense concern and zeal for 20th century martyrs and his resolve to proclaim and display them to the Church and to the world?
Much of John Paul’s life was under the tyranny of two totalitarian atheistic regimes which ruled much of Europe, and especially Eastern Europe for 50 years, 1939 - 1989.

It began when he was 19 with the invasion and occupation of Poland by the Nazis in 1939. After the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, the Soviet Union occupied Poland and Eastern Europe. They imposed communist rule and absorbed many nations into the Soviet Block until the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989. Karol was then 69 and Pope John Paul II.

In Poland he, and the people struggled and suffered under the tyranny of Nazism and Communism. He experienced the repression and persecution of the Church. With the imposition of a police state came the denial of human freedom and rights enforced by fear, violence and death. He knew of martyrs then and later as pope of countless martyrs in many places of our world.

Among many homilies for martyrs, one describes this kind of persecution suffered by so many. It’s from the Mass of Beatification of a Carmelite priest who was martyred in Dachau Concentration Camp on July 26, 1942. The Holy Father declared Father Titus Brandma ‘Blessed’ at St. Peter Basilica, Rome on November 11, 1985.

This is a brief ‘life’ of Blessed Titus: “Anno Brandsma was born into a deeply religious family in Bolswaard, Holland on February 23, 1881. Three of his sisters became nuns and an only brother, a Franciscan priest.

He entered the Carmelite Order in 1898 and became ‘Titus’. He was ordained in 1905. He taught at the Carmel for 15 years and then 19 years at the Catholic University of Nijmegen as Professor of Philosophy and Mystical Theology. His lectures took him even to the U.S.A.

Five years before the Nazi invasion and occupation of Holland in 1940 he was known as a public opponent of the Nazis and especially the persecution of Jews. He was involved in plans to aid Jews to escape to Carmelite missions in Brazil.
He was appointed National Spiritual Advisor to Dutch Catholic Journalists. In December 1941 he wrote to publishers and editors of the Catholic Press to refuse printing any Nazi propanganda.

In less than a month he was arrested on January 19, 1942 and eventually sent to the Concentration Camp at Dachau. On July 26, 1942 he was given a lethal injection of carbolic acid and died in ten minutes.

He gave his only possession, a rosary made by a fellow prisoner, to the nurse. He learned that she was a lapsed Catholic. She told him that she had forgotten prayers. He said: “If you can’t say the first part, just say, Pray for us sinners”. After the war she returned to the faith and testified in the Beatification process.
These excerpts are from John Paul II’s homily for Blessed Titus Brandsma: “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God” (Wis 3:1). The Church listens to this word on the day that she raises to the glories of the altar Titus Brandsma, son of the Netherlands and a religious of the Carmelite Order.
Once again, a man who passed through the torments of a concentration camp - in this case, Dachau - is raised to the glories of the altar. A man who “was punished”, in the words of today’s liturgy (Wis 3:4).

And precisely in the midst of this “punishment”, in the midst of a concentration camp, which remains the shameful blot upon this century, God found Titus Brandsma worthy of himself....

Titus Brandsma suffered torments: in the sight of men he was punished.... The ex-deportees of the concentration camps know very well what a human Calvary were those places of affliction.

The trial of physical fore, mercilessly pushed to the extreme of complete annihilation.

The trial of moral force....

The concentration camps were organized according to the programme of distain for man, according to the programme of hate.

Through what trials of conscience, of character, of heart must have passed a disciple of Christ who recalled his words concerning the love of one’s enemies!
Not to answer hate with hate, but with love. This is perhaps one of the greatest trials of man’s moral strength.

From this trial Titus Brandsma emerged victorious. 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”.

Of course, such heroism is not something that can be improvised. Father Titus spent his whole life bringing it to maturity, from the earliest experiences of his infancy, lived in a deeply Christian family, in his beloved Friesland. From the words and example of his parents, from the teachings he heard in the village church, from the charitable activities which he experienced in the parish community, he learned to know and to practice Christ’s fundamental commandment of love for everyone, not excluding one’s very enemies.

Father Brandsma was principally a professor of philosophy and of the history of mysticism at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. In this post he expended the best of his human and professional energies, watching over the intellectual training of a vast number of students.

Father Titus loved his students, and for this reason he felt impelled to share with them the values that inspired and sustained his own life. Thus there developed between teacher and pupil a dialogue that expanded and embraced not only the perennial great questions but also the questions posed by the events of a period over which the Nazi ideology was casting ever darker shadows.

For many years he worked on newspapers and periodicals, expressing in hundreds of articles the treasures of his mind and sensibility.

In the life of Father Brandsma what above all kindles our admiration is precisely this unfolding, in an every more manifest way, of the grace of Christ.

The words of Christ: “Apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5) constituted for him the directing principle of his daily choices”.

For this reason he prayed intensely. “Prayer is life, not an oasis in the desert of life”, he said.

From this profound union with God there arose in the soul of Father Brandsma a constant mood of optimism, which endeared him to those who had the good fortune to know him, and which never left him: it even accompanied him into the hell of the Nazi camp. Until the very end he remained a source of support and hope for the other prisoners: for everyone he had a smile, an understanding word, a kind gesture. The very nurse who, on July 26, 1942, injected him with deadly poison, later testified that she always retained the vivid memory of the face of that priest who “had compassion for me”.

And today we too see the face of Father Titus Brandsma before us, and we contemplate his luminous smile in the glory of God. He speaks to the faithful of his land, the Netherlands, and to all the faithful of the world, reaffirming his lifelong conviction: “Although neo-paganism no longer desires love, love will win back to us the hearts of the pagans. The practice of love will always make it a victorious force which will conquer and hold fast men’s hearts”.