Members of the Carmelite Family in Ireland, the Netherlands and around the world greeted with great joy the announcement by Pope Francis early this year that he would declare the Carmelite friar, Titus Brandsma, a saint on Sunday, May 15^th at St Peter’s in Rome.

Irish Carmelites feel a special closeness to this new saint as he spent time in Ireland during 1935. Titus Brandsma stayed with his Irish brothers at Whitefriar Street, Dublin, and Kinsale, Co. Cork, as he improved his command of the English language ahead of a lecture tour in the United States. He wrote with warmth about his time in Ireland where he met, among others, the President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, Mr Eamon De Valera.

Within seven years of this happy time in Ireland Titus would be killed by lethal injection in Dachau Concentration Camp, on Sunday July 26^th, 1942. The nurse who had administered the injection, and to whom he had given a rosary, later converted to Catholicism. She was a key witness in the early stages of the process for his beatification and canonisation. In her testimony she declared: “I was brought back to the right way through the intercession of Fr Titus.