We live in a world where love itself is condemned. People call it weakness, something to grow out of. Some are saying: 'Love is of no importance, we should rather develop our strength; let each one become as strong as he can, and let the weak perish.'
Again, they say that the Christian religion with its preaching about love is a thing of the past.
This is how it is: they come to you with such teaching, and even find people who take it up willingly. The neo-paganism [of the Nazis] may well cast-off love but, in spite of everything, history teaches us that we shall be the victors over this. We shall not forsake love.
Take the days as they come, the good with a grateful heart, and the
bad for the sake of those which follow, because misfortune is only a
passerby.
I see God in the work of His hands and the marks of His love in every visible thing. Do not yield to hatred. We are here in a dark tunnel, but we have to go on. At the end, an eternal light is shining for us.
Not my will but yours be done."
Titus Brandsma, Dutch priest, executed at Dachau, 26 July 1942
Brandsma had been vehemently opposed to Nazi ideology from the time Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933. By speaking out and writing against it many times before the Second World War, he was finally arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis in their infamous Dachau concentration camp where he died.
For weeks since his arrival into Dachau concentration camp just outside Munich, Brandsma had been starved and savagely beaten regularly. His body depleted of strength, Brandsma became infected with camp plague. Refusing to go to the camp hospital called by camp prisoners 'a hell within hell,' Brandsma was eventually admitted.
Its doctors, having no mission to heal and restore their patients often used them, as they did Brandsma, for cruel medical experimentation. In the end, the camp doctor assigned to his case ordered that his patient, now dying of terminal renal failure, be given a lethal injection.
Watching all of this was a Nazi nurse of Dutch origin who hated all religion, especially the clergy. As she observed Father Brandsma, she would sometimes mock him and his religion. This prompted him to often engage her in conversation, asking why she hated the faith so much.The nurse, who administered the injection to him, survived the war and testified to Brandsma’s cause of death that afternoon in the summer of 1942.
She was never able to forget him. She remembered his last moments, that he prayed for and forgave her, and that he reached into his tattered pocket to give her his only personal possession. It was a crude rosary made and given to Brandsma by another Dutch prisoner who also had been executed.
She had returned to the faith which she had abandoned for the Nazis.
Titus Brandsma was recognized as a martyr and saint on 25 November 2021.
"Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength. But it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it."
Léon Bloy
“No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and and should do is to seek truth, and to serve it when we have found it.The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves defeated in our innermost selves?”
Maximilian Kolbe
"The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals; they give them the opportunity to carry on their destruction; and of course they do so. Is this a sign that the Germans are brutalized in their simplest human feelings, that no chord within them cries out at the sight of such deeds, that they have sunk into a fatal consciencelessness from which they will never, never awake?
Isn't it a riddle and awe-inspiring that things can be so beautiful, despite the horror? I've seen something wondrous peering through my joy in the beautiful, a sense of its creator.
Only people can be truly ugly, because they have free will to separate themselves from this song of praise.
It often seems they will drown out this hymn with cannon thunder, curses, and blasphemy. But I have realized they will not succeed. And so I want to throw myself on the side of the victor.”
Sophie Scholl
"Only one who spent the years following the First World War in Germany can fully understand how hard a battle it was that a man like Carl von Ossietzky had to fight. He knew that the tradition of his countrymen, bent on violence and war, had not lost its power. He knew how difficult, thankless and dangerous a task it was. to preach sanity and justice to his countrymen who had been hardened by a rough fate and demoralizing influence of a long war.
In their blindness they repaid him in hatred, persecution and slow destruction; to heed him and to act accordingly would have meant their salvation and would have been a true relief for the whole world.
It will be to the eternal fame of the Nobel Foundation that it bestowed its high honor to this humble martyr and that it is resolved to keep alive the memory of his work. It is also wholesome for mankind today, since the fatal illusion against which he fought has not been removed by the outcome of the last war."
Albert Einstein, 1956
"And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you. But you'll go on anyhow.
But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow, before the gods of evil."
Martin Luther King
"Thankfully few are literally called today to the actual martyr's crown. But we are all called act for the truth even if there is some social and economic cost, and to take up our cross and follow, each day, in our own small ways, denying ourselves for Him.
That is all most of us can do-- be still, and faithful, and wait on the Lord in our calling.
And we must not add to or assist, in any way, the evil in the world, especially by condemning or harming those who stand up against its onslaught. That is Pilate's sin, to ask 'What is truth', and then turn away and lie, if only to ourselves, while looking truth in the face, for the sake of our own willfulness and ease.
It is a sin against the Spirit, and one that will not be easily forgiven.
It is shocking to have seen how many are willing to rise up in hate and anger, and fall away, bending to the darkness of this world, the proud and greedy and the lawless, and for what? For so little.
We may believe what we will. But we will be held accountable for our beliefs."
Jesse
