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.

Nicholas Owen was a small, unassuming carpenter and builder who became, in Elizabethan England, the most important protector of the hunted Catholic priesthood. For some twenty years, working almost always alone and in secret, he constructed the 'priest holes' — ingenious hiding places built into the walls, floors, stairwells, and chimneys of Catholic houses across the country.

A Jesuit lay brother, he laboured by night, often single-handedly cutting through stone and timber, so that no hired workman could betray his designs; the hides he built were so cunning that many were never discovered, and some are still being found in old English houses today. Countless priests owed their lives to his craft.

Twice imprisoned, he once engineered a daring escape from the Tower of London that freed a fellow Jesuit. He was finally captured in 1606 at Hindlip Hall, where he gave himself up in order to draw the searchers away from the priests hidden in his own handiwork.

Though the law forbade torturing a man to death, Owen — already frail and ruptured — was racked so savagely to make him reveal the houses he had served that he died under it. He was canonized in 1970 among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

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

Image: Mathias Tanner. Engraver Melchior Kusell (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/11364a.htm