Climbing up the ladder of life

[Traudel]

Climbing up the ladder of life

You are climbing up the ladder of life, which reaches into eternity.
Would God plant your feet upon an insecure ladder? Its supports may be
out of sight, hidden in secret places, but if God has asked you to
step on and up firmly, then surely He has secured your ladder. Faith
gives you the strength to climb steadily this ladder of life. You
should leave your security to God and trust Him not to let you fall.
He is there to give you all the power you need to keep on climbing.

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MAR 22 – ST NICHOLAS OWEN, SJ
(D. 1606) – MARTYR, BUILDER OF HIDING PLACES FOR PRIESTS

Nicholas, familiarly known as “Little John,” was small in stature but
big in the esteem of his fellow Jesuits. Born at Oxford, this humble
artisan saved the lives of many priests and laypersons in England
during the penal times (1559-1829), when a series of statutes punished
Catholics for the practice of their faith.

Over a period of about 20 years he used his skills to build secret
hiding places for priests throughout the country. His work, which he
did completely by himself as both architect and builder, was so good
that time and time again priests in hiding were undetected by raiding
parties. He was a genius at finding, and creating, places of safety:
subterranean passages, small spaces between walls, impenetrable
recesses. At one point he was even able to mastermind the escape of
two Jesuits from the Tower of London. Whenever Nicholas set out to
design such hiding places, he began by receiving the Holy Eucharist,
and he would turn to God in prayer throughout the long, dangerous
construction process.

Nicholas enrolled as an apprentice to the Oxford joiner William Conway
on the feast of the Purification of Blessed Mary, February 2nd, 1577.
He was bound in indenture and as an apprentice for a period of eight
years and the papers of indenture state that he was the son of Walter
Owen, citizen of Oxford, carpenter. Oxford at the time was strongly
Catholic. The Statute of artificers determined that sons should follow
the profession into which they were born. If he completed his
apprenticeship it would have been in 1585. We know from Fr. John
Gerard, SJ, a biographer of Nicholas’, that he began building hides in
1588 and continued over a period of eighteen years when he could have
been earning good money satisfying the contemporary demand for
well-made solid furniture.

St Henry Garnet, SJ, Jesuit Superior in England at the time, in a
letter dated 1596 writes of a carpenter of singular faithfulness and
skill who has traveled through almost the entire kingdom and, without
charge, has made for Catholic priests hiding places where they might
shelter the fury of heretical searchers. If money is offered him by
way of payment he gives it to his two brothers; one of them is a
priest, the other a layman in prison for his faith.

Owen was only slightly taller than a dwarf, and suffered from a hernia
caused by a horse falling on him some years earlier. Nevertheless, his
work often involved breaking through thick stonework; and to minimize
the likelihood of betrayal he often worked at night, and always alone.
The number of hiding-places he constructed will never be known. Due to
the ingenuity of his craftsmanship, some may still be undiscovered.

After many years at his unusual task, he entered the Society of Jesus
and served as a lay brother, although—for very good reasons—his
connection with the Jesuits was kept secret. After a number of narrow
escapes, he himself was finally caught in 1594. Despite protracted
torture, he refused to disclose the names of other Catholics. After
being released following the payment of a ransom, “Little John” went
back to his work. He was arrested again in 1606. This time he was
subjected to horrible tortures, suffering an agonizing death. The
jailers tried suggesting that he had confessed and committed suicide,
but his heroism and sufferings soon were widely known.

Why should priests need hiding places? From 1585 it was considered
treason, punishable by a traitor’s death, to be found in England if a
priest had been ordained abroad. Of Owen, the modern edition of
Butler’s Lives of the Saints says: “Perhaps no single person
contributed more to the preservation of Catholic religion in England
in penal times”.

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in earlier centuries often called the
Gunpowder Treason Plot or the Jesuit Treason, was a failed
assassination attempt against King James I of England and VI of
Scotland by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert
Catesby. The last hope for the Catholics collapsed when peace was
made with Spain. They had hoped that Catholic Spain, as part of the
bargain, would have secured freedom for them to practice their
religion. Relief of Catholics was discussed, but James said that his
Protestant subjects wouldn’t stand for it. So there was to be no
relief. In fact the screw was tightened again.

Anglican bishops were ordered to excommunicate Catholics who would not
attend Anglican services – this meant that no sale or purchase by them
was valid, no property could be passed on by deed or by will. The
level of persecution was higher than ever it had been under Elizabeth.

In the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, 1605, the result of the
frustration of a group of young Catholics when, after dropping hints
of toleration, James I made it clear that there would be no relaxation
of anti – Catholic legislation, the hunt for priests accused of
complicity centered on Hindlip House. This had been provided with
hiding places by Nicholas Owen which proved undetectable. He himself
was there and when he emerged after four days of hiding he was
arrested.

At daybreak on Monday, 20th November, 1605, Hindlip House was
surrounded by 100 men. They began to rip the house to pieces. In the
dark, early on Thursday morning, two men, Owen and Bl Ralph Ashley,
SJ, another lay-brother and cook, were spotted stealing along a
gallery. They said they were no longer able to conceal themselves,
having had but one apple between them for four days. They would not
give their names.

It was hardly likely that Nicholas Owen, of all people, would not have
been better provided. They had twice been tipped off during the
previous week that a search was imminent. Possibly they hoped that in
giving themselves up they would distract attention from the two
priests still in hiding, Fr Garnet, SJ, and Fr Oldcorne, SJ, still
hiding in Hindlip House, even to being mistaken for them. It was a
ruse that had worked before. It didn’t work now. The search was
intensified. The priests were in a hide which had been supplied with
a feeding tube from an adjoining bedroom, but the hiding place had not
been designed to be lived in for a week. After 8 days they emerged,
were arrested and identified. All four were taken to London.

Nicholas Owen, SJ, had been in prison before; he had been tortured
before. He was now taken to the torture room, for the first time, on
the 26th of February 1606. His identity as a hide-builder seemed to
have been betrayed. “We will try to get from him by coaxing, if he is
willing to contract for his life, an excellent booty of priests”.
Realizing just whom they had caught, and his value, Secretary of
State, Robert Cecil exulted: “It is incredible, how great was the joy
caused by his arrest… knowing the great skill of Owen in constructing
hiding places, and the innumerable quantity of dark holes which he had
schemed for hiding priests all through England.”

On March 2nd it was announced that Nicholas Owen had committed
suicide. People were simply incredulous. It would have been
impossible for one who had been tortured as he had. The Venetian
Ambassador reported home: “Public opinion holds that Owen died of the
tortures inflicted on him, which were so severe that they deprived him
not only of his strength but of the power to move any part of his
body”. It seems certain that the suicide story was a fiction concocted
by a Government deeply embarrassed to find itself with a corpse in its
custody as a result of torture.For those few grim days in February,
writes a historian, as the Government tried to break him, the fate of
almost every English Catholic lay in Owen’s hands.

In life he had saved them, in death he would too: not a single name escaped him.

In opposition to English law, which forbade the torture of a man
suffering from a hernia, as he was, he was racked day after day, six
hours at a time. He died under torture without betraying any secret –
and he knew enough to bring down the entire network of covert
Catholics in England.

“Most brutal of all was the treatment given to Nicholas Owen, better
known to the recusants as Little John. Since he had a hernia caused by
the strain of his work, as well as a crippled leg, he should not have
been physically tortured in the first place. But Little John, unlike
many of those interrogated, did have valuable information about the
hiding places he had constructed; if he had talked, all too many
priests would have been snared ‘like partridges in a net’. In this
good cause the government was prepared to ignore the dictates of the
law and the demands of common humanity. A leading Councillor, on
hearing his name, was said to have exclaimed: “Is he taken that knows
all the secret places? I am very glad of that. We will have a trick
for him.”

The trick was the prolonged use of the manacles, an exquisitely
horrible torture for one of Owen’s ruptured state. He was originally
held in the milder prison of the Marshalsea, where it was hoped that
other priests would try to contact him, but Little John was ‘too wise
to give any advantage’ and spent his time safely and silently at
prayer. In the Tower he was brought to make two confessions on 26
February and 1 March.

In the first one, he denied more or less everything. By the time of
the second confession, long and ghastly sessions in the manacles
produced some results (his physical condition may be judged by the
fact that his stomach had to be bound together with an iron plate, and
even that was not very effective for long). Little John admitted to
attending Father Garnet at White Webbs and elsewhere, that he had been
at Coughton during All Saints visit, and other details of his service
and itinerary. However, all of this was known already. Little John
never gave up one single detail of the hiding places he had spent his
adult life constructing for the safety of his co-religionists.

The lay brother died early in the morning of 2 March. He died directly
as a result of his ordeal and in horrible, lingering circumstances. By
popular standards of his day, this was a stage of cruelty too far. The
government acknowledged this in its own way by putting out the story
that Owen had ripped himself open with the knife given him to eat his
meat – while his keeper was conveniently looking elsewhere – rather
than face renewed bouts of torture. Yet Owen’s keeper had told a
relative who wanted Owen to make a list of his needs that his
prisoner’s hands were so useless that he could not even feed himself,
let alone write.

The story of the suicide was so improbable that neither Owen’s enemies
nor his friends, so well acquainted with his character over so many
years, believed it. Suicide was a mortal sin in the Catholic Church,
inviting damnation, and it was unthinkable that a convinced Catholic
like Nicholas Owen should have imperiled his immortal soul in this
manner.”

Father Gerard wrote of him: “I verily think no man can be said to
have done more good of all those who laboured in the English vineyard.
He was the immediate occasion of saving the lives of many hundreds of
persons, both ecclesiastical and secular.” -Autobiography of an
Elizabethan

Catholic stage magicians who practice Gospel Magic, a performance type
promoting Christian values and morals, consider St. Nicholas Owen the
Patron of Illusionists and Escapologists due to his facility at using
“trompe l’oeil”, “to deceive the eye”, when creating his hideouts and
the fact that he engineered an escape from the Tower of London. Many
Catholic builders, if they are familiar with him, may say a prayer of
intercession to St Nicholas Owen prior to beginning a new project.

“May the blood of these Martyrs be able to heal the great wound
inflicted upon God’s Church by reason of the separation of the
Anglican Church from the Catholic Church. Is it not one — these
Martyrs say to us — the Church founded by Christ? Is not this their
witness? Their devotion to their nation gives us the assurance that on
the day when — God willing — the unity of the faith and of Christian
life is restored, no offence will be inflicted on the honour and
sovereignty of a great country such as England.”

–from the Homily of Pope Paul VI at the canonization of Forty Martyrs
of England and Wales, including St. Nicholas Owen, SJ, 25 October
1970.

https://soul-candy.info/category/march/page/4/
by Matthew

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Sweet Lamb, perpetually immolated for us, we adore Thee,
and we beg of Thee, through the intercession of Thy holy
Mother, such a hatred of sin as will make us prefer the death
of the body to the staining of the soul.