“Mary was theotokos: God-bearer. We should be like this, bearing God to other people.”
Titus Brandsma was a Dutch Carmelite who was martyred in Dachau concentration camp for his opposition to the Nazis. He worked as an academic and a journalist and was arrested because of his efforts to help the Catholic press resist printing Nazi propaganda.
Titus had many different jobs and interests in his life, but they were all unified by his deep spirituality and the urge to communicate that spirituality, so that others could experience Gods love for themselves. He was famous for always having time for everyone who wanted to speak to him, because he was able to see the image of God in everyone. He was not afraid to stand up for what is right, even if that meant risking his own safety.
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That’s a very brief biography of Titus and misses out many of the different things that he did – he had a very busy life. Personally, I’ve always found him a very difficult figure to get a handle on: he was a man of very diverse interests, who seems to have been involved in everything: philosophy, journalism, university administration…
But there are one or two consistent threads that run through all his activities, and those have helped me to view his life in a more unified way. One of these is his long-standing interest in mysticism. This is a big word, but at heart it’s referring to the experience of God. What is it like for someone to life their life touched by God’s love and presence? And this is something that can be seen in many of the different areas of Titus’s life: very early in his life as a Carmelite he became interested in the writings of Teresa of Avila, and right through until the last weeks of his life he was fascinated by how her writings reflected the way in which she had responded to God’s presence in her life. He dedicated his academic work to studying mysticism. Indeed, one of his less well-known activities was that he travelled around Europe photographing old manuscripts of mystical texts. Not just the ones written in Latin, but the ones written in the ordinary everyday languages of Europe, where much more down-to-earth people had written down what they knew about God’s love. Many of these original manuscripts were destroyed during the War, so that they only survive in Titus’s photographs.
And this is the other angle from which I tend to see Titus’s life: his love for ordinary people, and his awareness of God’s love for them. He was genuinely interested in their lives and had a reputation for incredible generosity towards those who came to the door of the Carmelite house wanting to speak to a friar. His journalistic writings reflected this: they were aimed at bringing God to the ordinary people who read them.
These elements of Titus’s life continued to be present even after his arrest. It’s well worth reading some of the accounts of him in the various prisons and in Dachau. they show a man who was fully aware of what was happening to him, but survived as best he could, nonetheless. The priests and religious that were in the camp were able to celebrate Mass – how? what was that Mass like? — and Titus could keep the consecrated host in his glasses’ case, hidden from the guards. It seems amazing to me that Titus was able to maintain any sort of regular prayer life, imprisoned in that camp, surrounded by so much evil.
Titus didn’t survive the camp at Dachau. Throughout his life he had never enjoyed very good health, and the conditions in the camp led to him becoming sick. He was killed by one of the nurses there with a lethal injection. We remember Titus as a martyr: his commitment to God and to justice led to his arrest by the Nazis.
Let’s pray that the memory of Titus will serve as an inspiration to Carmelites today and in the future. That our own experience of God’s love will lead us to see justice as something worth making sacrifices for.
“Mary was theotokos: God-bearer. We should be like this, bearing God to other people.”
Richard Green O.Carm
