Best wishes to our Carmelite confreres, May 15 canonisation, Titus Brandsma O.Carm

Titus Brandsma (23 February 1881 – 26 July 1942) was a Dutch Carmelite friar, Catholic priest and professor of philosophy. Brandsma was vehemently opposed to Nazi ideology and spoke out against it many times before the Second World War. He was imprisoned in the infamous Dachau concentration camp, where he was murdered.

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 the Boxmeer monastery.

After being held prisoner in Scheveningen, Amersfoort, and Cleves, Brandsma was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp, arriving there on 19 June. 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.

Re-enactment for the Mary's Dowry Presents television series (2017) on lives of martyrs