About the booklet: This is the first station of the Way of the Cross by the Flemish expressionist painter Albert Servaes (1883-1966). He created it in 1919 for a church in the small village of Luithagen, Belgium, where it has continually received a great amount of attention. It is considered the pinnacle of Servaes’ work. One of the favoured themes of this deeply religious artist was the suffering of Christ, inspired by the gruesome events of World War I.
Servaes’ fourteen stations show the passion of Christ in all its rawness and inhumanity. The dark charcoal drawings and the thick lines present Christ’s agony in a direct and unadorned manner. The realistic character of these stations contrasted sharply with the usual manner of rendition.
Hence, soon after its placement, the work was condemned and by order of the Vatican removed from the church of Luithagen. It went from place to place and finally ended up in the Abbey of Koningshoeven near Tilburg in the south of the Netherlands in 1952.
This booklet (2004) has been published so as to allow readers to share in Brandsma's meditations as an entry into their own reflections on the passion and death of Jesus. The gruesome detail with which Titus at times imagines the passion of Christ may not suit every taste; but, one must remember, crucifixion was a rather nasty business. These meditations are not mere pious platitudes. Brandsma's sincere sorrow and love shine through them, the portent of his own Christ-like passion and death. May they be an inspiration of your own authentic prayer and meditation on this great gift of salvation: the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
About the author: Titus Brandsma OCarm was declared Blessed by Pope John Paul II on November 1985 and canonized on 15 May 2022 by Pope Francis.
The life of Titus Brandsma began in the quiet countryside of Friesland, Holland, where he was born on 23 February 1881, and ended some sixty years later on 26 July 1942, in the notorious hospital of the Dachau concentration camp.
Titus Brandsma, Dutch priest, educator, journalist and modern mystic, has much to say to Twenty-first Century Christians. His joyful countenance in the face of chronic illness and finally, at the torturous hands of the Nazi’s, is a study in humankind’s sharing of its portion of the Cross of Christ. The frail, bookish-looking clergyman with the big cigar, labeled “That dangerous little friar” by his enemies, was able to perform heroic acts of suffering, followed by forgiveness, because his faith and trust in God was so firmly rooted in prayer. Unlike Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who made a deliberate commitment of her life as an atonement for sin, Father Brandsma did not seek martyrdom, yet when he was thoroughly convinced it was God’s Will, he was able to accept humiliation and even death.
About Albert Servaes: Albert Servaes (1883-1966) was a Belgian expressionist painter. He was part of the first Latem school of painting which focused on mystical realism and became a founder of Belgian expressionism later in life. As a committed Catholic, he was ranked as a religious artist, typically showing the suffering of Christ, which stirred controversy in the Catholic Church. He also gained fame for his Belgian rural scene.
Albert Servaes was born in the city of Ghent, in the Flanders region of Belgium. At the age of 23, Servaes joined a community of artists in Latem, just outside of Ghent. He developed an interest in religious works and mysticism, which would play a major part in the first LatemSchool. Other members of the school included George Minne, Gustave van de Woestijne, Valerius De Sardeleer and Albijn Van den Abeele. The school’s mystical realism orientation was a reaction to the Paris-based impressionist art that had dominated the painting world for the previous half-century.
Servaes later experimented with painting techniques that founded Flemish expressionism. Because of his sympathies for Nazi cultural policy during the occupation of Belgium in World War II, Servaes fled to Switzerland in 1944 where he would remain until his death in 1966.
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