A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Certain pharisees came up to Jesus. Go on your way, they said to them to to him. Leave this place. Herod is trying to kill you.
Now notice these are pharisees, so they weren't all as bad as some of them were. Our lord's answer was, go tell that fox. Today and tomorrow, I cast out devils and perform cures. And on the third day, my purpose is accomplished. For all that, I must proceed on my course today, tomorrow, and the day after.
Since no prophet can be allowed to die anywhere except in Jerusalem. Oh, Jerusalem. Jerusalem. You slay the prophets and stone those who are sent to you. How often have I wanted to gather your children together as a mother bird collects her young under her wings?
And you refused. Your temple will be abandoned. I say to you, you shall not see me until the time comes when you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the lord. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. As I reckon it, this coming Sunday is going to see the beatification of the first martyr coming out of a Nazi concentration camp. November 3, in Rome, our holy father will formally and officially declare Titus Bransma. Now that is b r a n d s m a. He will declare him officially blessed, beatified.
Now that means this, that since 1973, they have examined meticulously his life, his works, and his writings. They have interviewed any number of witnesses. Now notice, in these canonizations, as with Colby, you have plenty of people who are living who knew him. This isn't going back and keep and getting dusty tomes out of some forgotten library. So anyway, they are convinced because two things, that there have been some miracles performed.
Now there it's not just their miracles, but what these wonderful things have to demonstrate is, first, they came from God. That was a supernatural act. And secondly, it was through the intercession of the of the the blessed or the what they call the servant of God. Those two things. Then they had to show that or that he lived a very that he was a martyr, or that he lived a heroically holy life.
In this case, they tried to prove or trying to prove that he was a martyr. So he will be the first Colby is a confessor. He, of course, came out of of concentration didn't come out of the camp, of course. But Colby is a confessor. This man is going to be at be beatified as a martyr.
So he will be at be beatified. Now the consequences of beatification in simply very simple words are two. First of all, that the church will authorize veneration if you wish to do it. In other words, there'll be veneration allowed to the servant of God, in this case, Titus, father Titus. And then secondly, that the this veneration will be restricted either to a country, or to a religious order, or to a region, or what have you.
They're the two consequences of beatification. Canonization changes that. Veneration becomes obligatory, and the veneration is for the universal church. So this Sunday, we are going to have the formal beatification of father Titus Branzema, a Dutchman, came from Holland, from Frisia, the most northern province of Holland. He was born in 1888, and was murdered in 1942 in Dachau, that infamous con concentration camp not far from Munich.
Now, here we we you just heard read Saint Paul's letter to the Romans. If one picture is worth a thousand words, then a life lived heroically is worth any number of words. And that's why the church play presents that's one of the reasons that the church presents these saints to us day after day, year in and year out. Don't get tired of it. Open your eyes and your mind to what the church is telling you.
It's saying, look at these people. They were no better and no worse than you. Titus didn't wake up one morning and say, I'm going to be a saint and a martyr. Colby didn't wake up one morning and said, by golly, I'm going to give my life, and I'm gonna be celebrated by the holy Roman Catholic church as a saint. And that's nonsense.
There if anyone ever gets that idea, they'll never be a saint. I assure you that. That is the word gets out. Now Colby came from a farming area way up there in Friesau, way up there. Get your map and look at it.
In Holland, Dutchman. Came from a dairy farm. Joined the Carmelites in '98, and was ordained a priest in 1905. And the Carmelite. They sent him down to Rome, and he took a PhD there in the Gregorian University in philosophy.
Showed he has a great deal of common sense. Then he came back and his life was illustrious. One of his contemporaries said that there was scarcely anything that happened in Catholic way in Holland, that in one way or another he wasn't associated with. He became a teacher, he was he helped to found the University of Nimigan, he was a professor there, he became a director, he established two scholarly journals, became the the editor of the paper of Oss, the Catholic paper. He was elected as head of the Catholic schools to represent them at The Hague, this is important.
He was appointed by the he was elected as spiritual director of the Association of Catholic Journalists in Holland, of which there were 30 Catholic papers. This is about 1935. There were 30 Catholic papers in Holland. He was made head of them, and this is what got him into trouble. Because as early as 1935, when he came to The United States, went to Canada, was received over at the Catholic University, they had a reception for him.
I think they gave him an honorary degree. You see, he's one of us. This is what I'm trying to bring out. He's a man of our times. He went back, and that's when the trouble started.
There were not there were Dutch Nazis. And from the very beginning, this man saw that that was evil. And he publicly condemned them without any without any qualifications, that it was pagan, that the treatment of the Jews was wrong, that it had nothing to do with godliness. So he became their most outspoken enemy of them in Holland, without any question. And then, when he got these important positions, with regard to the schools, and then as regard lead being the leader of the association of the journalists of the Catholic papers, and they must have been influential.
And he begged these guys not to take any advertisements from the Nazis, not to abuse their propaganda. He did this openly. So even before the Nazis actually took over Holland, the Dutch Nazis of course, he was condemned as a communist. They looked upon him as their greatest enemy of what they called national socialism. This was before the Nazis actually took on.
Well, when they took it, of course he became a target, because he didn't mince his words. He was ordered by the occupation, the army of the occupation, to throw out of the Catholic schools the Jewish children who were in them. He refused to do it. He was part of a of a plan which didn't didn't come off, but he was certainly was part of it, to have a a large number of groups emigrate from Holland to Brazil, where they would have been taken care of by Carmelite missionaries down there. Well, that didn't ingratiate him with the Nazis at all.
He would have no parts of it. And then the bishops asked him secretly to try to influence the editors of the papers to get them together and and have a united front in the face of the occupation of the Nazis. And he was informed upon one of his own one of his own household. I don't know who it was. Informed on him, and the Nazis arrested him for treason, and for being subservient, and for being an enemy of the state, which he truly was.
This was '19 hundred and forty two, January. He spent six months in three jails, wound up in Dachau, where they experimented on him, and then finally when he wasn't any more used to him, after six months they injected some kind of a lethal drug, and in ten minutes he was dead, and then cremated. Cremated, and then flung into the common grave of Dachau. That is in brief the story of his life. Now, before I leave, I have to go to another little point.
I want to emphasize this, he didn't think he was doing anything extraordinary. All he did was to do the job which was on his threshold when after saying mass, he went out. He did what he saw had to be done. He didn't look around and say, I'm gonna convert the Eskimo. He did the job that he saw he had to do, And he did the best he could with doing it, and it was all kinds of jobs.
Now here is the final little point that I is news to me. Dacao, of course, is now kind of a money. There are three chapels there, I'm told. I haven't been there. I'm giving this from what I just read.
There are three chapels, and back of the three chapels, which are part of the camp, you have a wall. In that wall, there is a door. That door leads into a courtyard where there is a convent of nuns, which is part now of the camp. That is the caramel of God the blood of God, founded by Carmelites, Carmelite nuns who are spending their lives there in contemplation, in prayer, in solitude. Can you imagine the contrast between what's in that little chapel and the horrors that that camp saw?
And there are if there's any answer to the problem of evil in the world, it's the answer that those nuns are giving with their lives. It's can you can you you talk about her heroism. You talk about living an heroic life. They're doing what they see has to be done, and they're doing it. They are a living monument to man's to some men's and some women's faith in God's love.
We dare say there is a God, and God loves us in spite of the dark house. But because of men and women like father Titus Carmelite. In the name of the father, son, the holy spirit. Amen.