Carmel-in-the-City to mark Canonisation of Bl Titus Brandsma

Bl Titus Brandsma O.Carm

Carmel-in-the-City, the Spirituality Group based at St Joseph's Bunhill Row, near London's Barbican, will mark the forthcoming Canonisation of Blessed Titus Brandsma O.Carm. with a 12 noon Mass and Afternoon Reflection, Saturday, 7 May 2022. All are welcome!

Some Carmel-in-the-City members will travel to Rome for the Canonisation on Sunday, 15 May 2022.

The Carmelite Order will hold a number of events in Rome to honour the new Saint: https://ocarm.org/en/canonization-of-blessed-titus-brandsma

Blessed Titus was martyred in Dachau, 26 July 1942, and will be canonised in Rome, Sunday, 15 May 2022, along with others, including Blessed Charles de Foucauld.

Brandsma wrote extensively in newspapers and popular magazines as well as in learned journals. Titus Brandsma stayed with his Irish Carmelite brothers at Whitefriar Street in Dublin and Kinsale, Co Cork, as he improved his English, ahead of a lecture tour in the United States in 1935.

He later wrote with warmth about his time in Ireland where he met, among others, then president of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, Éamon de Valera. Titus' interests were many and included Marian devotion, ecumenism, Frisian culture, education, and journalism. The last preoccupation was to prove the occasion of his death.

After the invasion of the Netherlands by the Third Reich in May 1940, Brandsma's long-term fight against the spread of Nazi ideology and for educational and press freedom brought him to the attention of the Nazis.

In January 1942, he undertook to deliver by hand a letter from the Conference of Dutch Bishops to the editors of Catholic newspapers, in which the bishops ordered them not to print official Nazi documents, as was required under a new law by the German occupiers. He had visited fourteen editors before being arrested on 19 January at Boxmeer Carmelite Priory.

Accused of being an ally of communism, he was dubbed by the Nazis as "the Dangerous Little Friar". After being held prisoner in Scheveningen, Amersfoort, and Cleves, Brandsma was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp, arriving there on 19 June 1942. His health quickly gave way, and he was transferred to the camp hospital. He died on 26 July 1942, from a lethal injection administered by a nurse of the Allgemeine SS, as part of their program of medical experimentation on the prisoners.

For further details see: www.carmelinthecity.org.uk

email: sylvia_lucas@btinternet.com or tell: 07889 436 165