Weekly Bulletin

Sixth Sunday of Easter - May 22, 2022

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WEEKLY FEATURE

The Communion of Saints:
Pope Francis canonizes 10 new saints

Dear friends in Christ,

Last weekend at the Sunday liturgy at St. Peters, our Holy Father raised 10 religious men and women, priests, and a lay man to the altars of the Church.  The truth is, the Church does not “make” saints, it recognizes them.  God and the cooperation of men and women of faith makes saints.  As Pope Francis said in his homily: 
 
“Holiness does not consist of a few heroic gestures, but of many small acts of daily love.”

The Mass began with the rite of canonization, which included the reading of short biographies of each blessed.  A Litany of Saints was sung before Pope Francis recited the formula of canonization: “For the honor of the Blessed Trinity, the exaltation of the Catholic faith and the increase of the Christian life, by the authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and our own, after due deliberation and frequent prayer for divine assistance, and having sought the counsel of many of our brother bishops, we declare and define Blessed Titus Brandsma, Lazarus known as Devasahayam, César de Bus, Luigi Maria Palazzolo, Giustino Maria Russolillo, Charles de Foucauld, Marie Rivier, Maria Francesca di Gesu Rubatto, Maria di Gesù Santocanale, and Maria Domenica Mantovani to be saints and we enroll them among the saints, decreeing that they are to be venerated as such by the whole Church. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

I want to look at two of these saints today: St. Charles de Foucauld and St. Titus Brandsma.

                                                      St. Charles de Foucauld

Born into a wealthy French family Charles lost his faith and his bearings after being orphaned at an early age. He barely made it through military school, was often disciplined for his behavior and for openly parading his mistress about town. He was lost.

He managed to pull himself together when needed as part of military operations in Algeria and it was through seeing the faith of the Muslim people there that his own journey towards faith began.  He left the military and undertook a very risky exploration of Morocco, which was closed to Europeans at the time, disguising himself as a poor rabbi and traveling with various caravans. This event aroused all the questions and yearnings of his heart as he faced his own vulnerability and witnessed up close the lived faith of Islam.

“As soon as I believed that there was a God, I understood that there was nothing else I could do but to live totally for him. My religious vocation dates from the same hour as my faith.”
It took him many years and wanderings before he met the one whom he called his beloved brother and Lord, Jesus. But when he finally encountered him, Charles was overwhelmed by the love of God he found in Jesus.
 
His inner quest took him to the Holy Land and later to the Trappists where he spent several years. The more his prayer became a mystical meeting with Jesus, the more he was drawn to seek Jesus in others. He came to understand his vocation as imitation of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. By this he meant a truly contemplative life rooted in the ordinary life of poor people. It was not a straight path or even very clear for himself. But he followed the thing inside of himself which kept pushing him further and deeper. This intuition led him to leave the Trappists and to eventually return to Algeria, to share with those from whom he had received so much, the love of God that he had discovered.

“It is love which should recollect you in me, not distance from my children. See me in them, and like me at Nazareth, live near them, lost in God.” Meditation by Charles de Foucauld

At the heart of Charles’ way of prayer was a deeply eucharistic spirituality. He saw in the gift of Jesus’ body and blood the sign of God’s abiding presence among us, a love capable of healing and saving our broken humanity and the image of his own way of presence to others.
 
His belief in this double presence -presence to God and presence to others– was a unifying and healing factor in his life.

Charles lived this out in Algeria, which played such an instrumental part of his conversion, and among the Tuareg people. He saw his way of presence and friendship, as well as his life of prayer, as his mission and thought of himself. He understood that it was not a time for conversions, and felt that his life could be about creating bonds of understanding and respect with this people. He extensively studied the language and culture of the Tuareg.

Charles was killed Dec.1, 1916 in the confusion of World War I, having chosen to remain among those in Tamanrasset who were too poor to flee the conflicts in the area. He had been well aware of the risk to his own life.

”The weakness of human means is a source of strength. Jesus is the Master of the impossible.” -St. Charles de Foucauld

He was beatified in Rome on Nov. 13, 2005. Charles had no followers at the time of his death and would have remained virtually unknown had it not been for a biography published a few years after his death by Rene Bazin.  Brother Charles is sometimes remembered as a model of “desert spirituality” and for what has become known as the Prayer of Abandonment. It was taken from a much longer meditation which he wrote many years earlier, in fact while he was still a Trappist monk.  He imagined Jesus as he was dying on the cross and places these words on Jesus’ lips.  It is the last prayer of our Master, of our Beloved… may it be ours… May it not only be the prayer of our last moment, but that of all our moments…

"Father, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you; I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only you Will be done in me, and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself to surrender myself into your hands without reserve and with boundless confidence. For you are my Father. Amen.

                                                        St. Titus Brandsma

Titus Brandsma was born in the Netherlands, a country bordering Belgium and Germany, on Feb. 23, 1881. His parents named him Anno Sjoerd Brandsma and he grew up in the rural setting of Oegeklooster in the province of Friesland. His family lived on the proceeds of the milk and cheese produced by their dairy cattle.  Brandsma felt a calling to the religious life and joined the Carmelite monastery in Boxmeer, southeastern Netherlands, in 1898, taking his father’s name, Titus, as his religious name.

Although the Carmelites are known for separating themselves from worldly affairs and engaging in contemplative prayer, Brandsma felt called to a second vocation that would draw him into the drama of interwar Europe: that of journalism.   In the years ahead, he would successfully combine the two seemingly contrasting vocations.

Brandsma was ordained to the priesthood on June 17, 1905. After studying in Rome, he returned to home to work in the field of Catholic education. When the Catholic University of Nijmegen was founded in 1923, he joined the faculty, rising to become the institution’s rector magnificus, or head, in 1932. With fears of a second world war rising in Europe, Father Brandsma embarked on a lecture tour of Carmelite foundations in the United States in 1935. 
 
To improve his English, he visited Ireland, staying with Carmelite communities in Dublin. Shortly before he crossed the Atlantic, Father Brandsma was appointed spiritual adviser to the staff of more than 30 Catholic newspapers in the Netherlands. Upon arrival in the U.S., he traveled in the East and Midwest, giving lectures at the request of his superiors in Rome. 

Throughout the 1930s, Father Brandsma watched aghast as Adolf Hitler strengthened his grip on neighboring Germany. The friar sharply criticized Nazi policies in newspaper articles and lectures. “The Nazi movement is a black lie,” he said. “It is pagan.”  After Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, the authorities imposed severe restrictions on the Church. They ordered Catholic schools to expel Jewish students, barred priests and religious from serving as high school principals, restricted charitable collections, and censored the Catholic press. The Dutch bishops asked Father Brandsma to plead their cause, but without success. In 1941, the bishops spoke out boldly against the Nazis. Their interventions infuriated Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Reich commissioner of the German-occupied Netherlands, who sought ways of striking back. When Dutch newspapers were told to accept advertisements and press releases from their Nazi overlords, the archbishop of Utrecht asked Father Brandsma to tell the country’s Catholic editors that they should refuse the order.
 
On March 12, 1942, Father Brandsma was taken to a harsh transit camp at Amersfoort, central Netherlands. With around 100 other prisoners, he was forced to stand outside in the bone-chilling rain.  The Carmelite was put to work clearing a forest. Despite the grueling work, he remained cheerful, according to fellow prisoners, who recalled that he would share his tiny rations with the hungry and show special care for Jewish prisoners.  Father Brandsma disobeyed a ban on priestly ministry, giving prisoners his daily blessing by quietly making the Sign of the Cross on their hands with his thumb. He heard confessions, visited the dying, and even led the Stations of the Cross.  He stood firm in the face of further Gestapo questioning and was eventually told that he would be sent to the Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany, later called "the largest priest cemetery in the world."

From the very moment Titus entered the camp, his calmness and gentleness infuriated his captors.  They beat him mercilessly with fists, clubs, and boards. They kicked, punched, and gouged him, drawing blood and oftentimes leaving him nearly unconscious in the mud. During one beating, Father Brandsma was holding a consecrated Host concealed in a tobacco pouch. He kept it safe by keeping his arm pinned to his body as the blows rained down. When he made it back to his bunk, another Carmelite prisoner tried to comfort him.  Throughout, he retained what one inmate called a “cheerful courage.” He advised others to be patient and avoid hatred. 

“We are here in a dark tunnel but we have to go on. At the end, the eternal light is shining for us,” 

For as long as possible, he resisted going to the camp’s hospital, aware that the doctors performed sadistic experiments on patients. But he was finally admitted, and on Sunday, July 26, 1942, a nurse gave him a lethal injection.

The friar was beatified by Pope John Paul II on Nov. 3, 1985, as a martyr for the faith. In his homily, the Polish Pope praised Father Brandsma’s “constant vein of optimism… It accompanied him even in the hell of the Nazi camp. Until the end, he remained a source of support and hope for the other prisoners: he had a smile for everyone, a word of understanding, a gesture of kindness,” he said. The same ‘nurse,’ who on July 26, 1942, injected him with deadly poison, later testified that she always kept vivid in her memory the face of that priest who “had compassion on me.”

All Christians are called to be saints. Saints are persons in heaven (officially canonized or not), who lived heroically virtuous lives, offered their life for others, or were martyred for the faith, and who are worthy of imitation.

A canonized saint is a person who is recognized as having an exceptional degree of holiness, likeness, or closeness to God- what the Church calls “heroic virtue.” All of the faithful deceased in Heaven are considered to be saints, but some are considered worthy of greater honor and imitation. We are blessed, because these special men and women, part of the Communion of Saints, pray for us and intercede for the Church.    

God bless you,  Fr. Dennis

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