Quote of the day, 13 June: St. Titus Brandsma

“Nothing bad can happen to me because the Lord is with me.” #StTitusBrandsma

On June 12 [1942], Titus was told that, along with other prisoners, he would be leaving Kleve for Dachau the following day.

The next morning forty prisoners were lined up in front of the prison, chained two by two, awaiting the order to march to the station and board the train that would take them to Dachau.

His eyes clouded by tears, the chaplain kept his eyes fixed on Titus, who appeared full of some inner fortitude and suffused with an inner light. As the Carmelite passed close to him, he heard him say, without looking at him directly, “Goodbye, my good friend. Nothing bad can happen to me, because the Lord is with me.”

The previous evening Fr. Deimel had brought Titus Holy Communion. Now Titus would imitate the great Patriarch of Carmel, the Prophet Elijah, who—persecuted for his defense of the true religion, exhausted and on the point of collapse—with the strength of bread provided by an angel, was able to walk forty days and forty nights to the Mountain of God (1 Kgs 19:7–8).

Titus, strengthened by the Eucharist, set out along the final stretch of his Way of the Cross.

Miguel Arribas, O.Carm.

Chapter XI, A break along the way

These boxcars used in the 1942 Westerbork deportation of St. Edith Stein and many other Dutch Jews were the same type used for St. Titus Brandsma’s grueling June 13–19, 1942 trip from the transit camp in Kleve, Germany to the Dachau Concentration Camp.

Arribas O.Carm., M 2021, The Price of Truth: Titus Brandsma, Carmelite, Carmelite Media, Darien, Illinois.

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