St. Titus Brandsma

Who they were

Titus Brandsma was a Dutch Carmelite: philosophy professor, university rector at Nijmegen, mystic scholar, and above all the national advisor to the Catholic press. He was a small, chain smoking, chronically ill friar of legendary warmth.

When the occupying Nazis ordered Dutch newspapers to carry National Socialist propaganda and advertisements, it was Brandsma who carried the bishops' answer, personally visiting editor after editor with the instruction to refuse, knowing precisely what the errand was worth. Arrested in January 1942, he passed through the camps with his gentleness intact. Prisoners' testimony records him sharing rations, blessing his beaters, and counselling despairing men. He was killed by lethal injection in July 1942, and the detail that matters most here is the last one: he gave his rosary to the nurse who administered the injection, a lapsed Catholic, telling her she could still pray. She kept it, and her later testimony of that moment, and her return to the faith, became part of his cause.

Why people turn to St. Titus Brandsma

Journalists, editors, and everyone whose work is public truth under private pressure, with St. Francis de Sales and St. John Chrysostom. And anyone who has ever held a rosary and wondered whether it was worth anything: his last argument was that it was.

How to ask their intercession

Before publishing the thing it would be easier not to. And his final gift frames a hard devotion: pray one rosary for the person who has hurt you most. He did.