Feast day: March 22

St. Nicholas Owen

Religious, Martyr · d. 1606

Patron of Illusionists, builders

A short, frail Jesuit lay brother and master carpenter who spent decades secretly building hiding places — 'priest holes' — that saved countless hunted priests in England.

For twenty years he built ingenious hidden chambers in Catholic houses by night, single-handed; under torture he never revealed one of them.