Being a saint isn’t about living on a hilltop, or moving entire worlds thanks to charismatic leadership. Rather, it’s about fully offering skills and work in the form of a prayer that serves God on a minute-by-minute basis – even when it comes to mundane things like digging trenches.
In that respect, Nicholas Owen had it right. Born into a pious Catholic family, with two brothers who were priests - and another who was an underground publisher of Catholic books - Nicholas Owen served the Jesuits for many years before becoming a lay brother sometime around 1580. Being only slightly higher than a dwarf, he was often called “Little John.”
However, Nicholas Owen’s holiness didn’t come from belonging to any religious organization, but rather was the result of old-fashioned, sweat-making work. Nicholas Owen was a construction worker - and he must have been a good one
The Superior of the English Jesuits, Father Henry Garnet, asked Nicholas to build secret rooms in mansions throughout England where priests at that time were hiding from persecution. Nicholas’ presence at the construction sites was justified by his working on projects during the day. At night he would dig tunnels, and an assortment of “priest holes” that included hidden rooms and passages.
With time Nicholas’ curriculum began to closer resemble the Paul Newman character in the classic film “Cool Hand Luke,” than Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Besides using the aliases of Andrews and Draper, impersonating a priest, and being a jailbird, Nicholas was aiding and abetting outlaws from the English government. He was even credited with being the mastermind for a well-known priest’s escape from the Tower of London.
On paper Nicholas was anything but a saint.
The last time that Nicholas was arrested was in 1606 as part of the government’s reaction to the foiled Gunpowder Plot – a conspiracy led by some Catholics who swore an oath on the Holy Sacrament to blow up King James and the Parliament for the exacting of harsh penalties on English Catholics.
With the English government believing that the Jesuits were behind the planning of the Gunpowder Plot, a wide net was cast. At the time of his arrest Nicholas was impersonating Father Henry Garnet, the Jesuit Superior.
Upon the capture of Nicholas, England’s Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil the First Earl of Salisbury, is said to have written, “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.”
Nicholas was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He refused to give information and was the subject of violent torture: His body was suspended by the placing of his arms in iron rings, while heavy weights were placed upon his feet.
But Nicholas’ nasty and lengthy death isn’t alone what makes him a saint.
There is no way of knowing how many priests Nicholas’ hidden passages saved, but thanks much to this diminutive construction worker the Catholic faith in England was preserved.
In this respect, Nicholas is a model for all of us: to offer our daily labor - no matter how humble it might be - to God as a prayer. In that way we are all called to be ordinary saints - that’s the rule, not the exception.
Background:
Born in Oxford, England at an unknown date, St Nicholas died in the Tower of London in 1606. He was beatified in 1929, and canonized in 1970 by Pope Paul VI as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales whose joint Feast Day is October 25.
Robert Duncan is a foreign correspondent and ombudsman for press in Spain. He is a board member and honorary vice-president for the Organización de Periodismo y Comunicación Ibero-Americana. Beside being widely published, Robert is News Editor for Spero News, blogs at Pelican Press, and maintains the Santificarnos website.
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Ordinary Saints « Saint Joseph Software said,
September 11, 2006 at 8:23 am
Roger Knight said,
Fawkes and his co-conspirators loaded over 5,000 pounds of gunpowder into storage units they rented underneath the Houses of Parliament. The idea was to time the explosion to when King James was giving the speech to open Parliament. The place would have been packed with every serving MP, the Royal Family and every other high ranking person who was able to get a ticket.
Had the bomb gone off, the Houses of Parliament and the surrounding area would have been as utterly destroyed as the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. With the government murdered, the impact would have been more devastating on the Great Britain then recently formed by the union of Scotland and England through the placement of the Scottish King on the English throne.
The Protestant movement was a Christian movement for independence from the Church in Rome, and in England, Wales and Scotland, national independence from any European controlled ecclesiastical heirarchy. The non-Catholic British viewed Catholics with suspicion because of this political dispute. They felt that where there are too many Catholics, there is tyranny from Rome.
Tyranny as in burning people like Giordarno Bruno at the stake for postulating that the distant stars were Suns with planets orbiting, and that some of those planets might be Earthlike and have people looking back at us.
That kind of tyranny.
Thus the laws discriminating against Catholics that Guy Fawkes was fighting with the Gunpowder Plot.
Today, we are threatened with the imposition of a new form of religious tyranny in the form of sharia fascism imposed by the New Caliphate through planetary jihad. On September 11, 2001, October 12, 2002, March 11, 2004 and July 7, 2005, these jihadists were more successful than Guy Fawkes and his gang.
Please forgive me not considering that those who perpetrate this modern terrorism and their supporters as saints, and because of this I do not consider Nicholas Owen a saint.
The solution to what the Catholics in England and the non-Catholics were experiencing in the rest of Europe was the one proposed by Thomas Jefferson and the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and enshrined in the First Amendment: Complete separation of church and state and the ban on religious tests for public office. How else can a nation with Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish citizens live without religious strife?
Unfortunately, to include Muslim citizens in the mix they have accept the equality before the law of the non-Muslims, and not support a Jihad to impose sharia fascism on the Infidel. Otherwise we cannot trust them anymore than the 1605 British could trust Catholics.
September 11, 2006 at 6:46 pm
BG said,
Have you seen http://www.hoax-buster.org
September 11, 2006 at 8:35 pm
Roger Knight said,
His body was too badly broken up for a decent mummification!
That story makes as much sense as the Bible is Phony Because Egyptians Did Similar Things story told at Hoax Buster.
The problem with religion is the same old one: People will believe in God because they cannot accept the Universe is just is, and will believe in ghosts and either an afterlife or reincarnation because they cannot accept death is just death.
Unfortunately such faith is prone to abuse by those who want to use it for obtaining wealth without producing something tangible for it and for obtaining political type power. Thus the “My Way or the Afterlife Highway” attitude of those who claim to represent God on Earth. And they will send you on to the Afterlife Highway if you disagree with them!
September 11, 2006 at 9:46 pm
BG said,
September 11, 2006 at 11:42 pm