St Nicholas Owen

Today is, in this archdiocese, the feast day of St Nicholas Owen. This is a slightly revised version of a post I wrote last year.

A modern statue of St Nicholas Owen

Image: Church of St Nicholas Owen Little Thornton website

St Nicholas was the Jesuit laybrother who used his remarkable skills as a carpenter and stonemason to construct numerous ingenious priest holes to safeguard mission priests in the late sixteenth century. He was born in Oxford c.1550 in a house on the junction of what is now Queen Street and St Ebbe's Street, and his whole family were of Catholic and recusant sympathies. He died as a result of torture in the Tower of London on March 2nd 1606, having been apprehended in the follow-up to the Gunpowder Plot. His refusal to the point of death to disclose the names of priests and their hiding places safeguarded the Catholic mission at this critical time

The recent Oxford DNB life of him by Michael Hodgetts can be read here. There is also an online biography of St Nicholas, who was canonized in 1970 here, and there are some linked articles here about his life and about his capture and death.

St Nicholas Owen

Had today not been a Sunday it would have been, in this archdiocese, the feast day of St Nicholas Owen. 

St Nicholas was the Jesuit laybrother who used his remarkable skills as a carpenter and stonemason to construct numerous ingenious priest holes to safeguard mission priests in the late sixteenth century. Born in Oxford  c.1550 in a house on the junction of what is now Queen Street and St Ebbe's Street he died as a result of torture in the Tower of London on March 2nd 1606, having been apprehended in the follow-up to the Gunpowder Plot.

There are biographies of St Nicholas, who was canonized in 1970, here, and here, and here.