Pope Francis canonized 10 new saints in the Catholic Church this Sunday, including a priest martyred by the Nazis during the Holocaust who has been proposed as a patron saint of journalists.
At a special canonization Mass Sunday, the Pope declared that the 10 men and women whose causes had met the necessary requirements, would be added to the names of saints officially recognized by the Church. The list included 5 priests, 4 nuns, and and Indian convert who was martyred for his faith.
“To serve the Gospel and our brothers and sisters, to offer our lives without expecting anything in return, any worldly glory: this is a secret and it is our calling,” Francis said during his homily at the Mass. “That was how our fellow travelers canonized today lived their holiness. By embracing with enthusiasm their vocation — as a priest, as a consecrated woman, as a lay person — they devoted their lives to the Gospel. They discovered an incomparable joy and they became brilliant reflections of the Lord of history. For that is what a saint is: a luminous reflection of the Lord of history. May we strive to do the same.”
Among the newly canonized saints was one Titus Brandsma, a Dutch priest and journalist who opposed the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. Born Anno Sjoerd Brandsma in the Netherlands in 1881, he entered the novitiate of the Carmelite order in 1898. He took the religious name Titus, which was his father’s name, as well as a first-century Christian martyr and the namesake of the Epistle to Titus. He was ordained as a Carmelite friar in 1905.
St. Titus helped found the Catholic University of Nijmegen, where he was named Rector in 1932. Brandsma was also a professional journalist, and founded a Catholic newspaper in 1909, that at one point circulated more than 13,000 copies a day, America Magazine noted. The paper, Karmelrozen, took over the local newspaper in the town of Oss in 1909.
St. Titus wrote extensively against the Nazis in the early 1940s. According to the National Catholic Register, in 1941, he authored a letter from Dutch bishops to the principals of Catholic schools in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, which opposed the ordered expulsion of Jewish students from Catholic schools. In the letter, he condemned anti-Semitism and said the Nazi ideology was incompatible with the Church. He also wrote and spoke out against Nazi propaganda in Dutch Catholic newspapers, and against anti-Jewish marriage laws. He was arrested in 1942 and sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where he was executed by lethal injection.
In response to the news of his canonization, a group of Catholic journalists petitioned the Pope to declare St. Titus the co-patron saint of journalists. The current patron is St. Francis de Sales, the French priest and bishop whose writings helped to convert more than 40,000 Swiss Calvinists in the late 16th century. “He is undoubtedly a holy man of faith and of great merit,” the journalists said of St. Francis, “but he was not a journalist in the modern sense of the word. Titus Brandsma was.”
“We, Catholic journalists, recognize in Titus Brandsma a professional peer and fellow believer of considerable standing. Someone who shared the deeper mission that should drive journalism in modern times: a search for truth and veracity, the promotion of peace and dialogue between people,” they added.
Among the other saints canonized on Sunday was Devasahayam (Lazarus) Pillai, an 18th-century Indian convert to Christianity who was martyred for his faith by local leaders; César de Bus, a French priest and founder of the order of Fathers of Christian Doctrine; Luigi Maria Palazzolo, a priest who cared for orphans in Italy; Giustino Maria Russolillo, a priest who founded the Vocationist order, seeking to expand vocations to the religious life; Charles de Foucauld, a missionary to the Tuareg people in Algeria; and four nuns — Marie Rivier, Maria Francesca di Gesù Rubatto, Maria di Gesù Santocanale and Domenica Mantovani — who also founded their own religious orders.