Saint Nicholas Owen

Saint Nicholas Owen was an English carpenter and a brother of the Society of Jesus. For nearly twenty years he built hiding places for hunted priests in Catholic houses, and in 1606 he died under torture in the Tower of London without having betrayed anyone. He is one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on March 22.

He was born in Oxford; the year of his birth is not known. He was the son of a carpenter and took up his father’s trade. Two of his brothers became priests. He grew up in the England of Queen Elizabeth I, where the Catholic faith could not be freely practiced. From 1585 the law there forbade Catholic priests to minister, and it also punished those who hid them.

According to the accounts that have come down to us, he served Saint Edmund Campion, and after Campion’s execution he was imprisoned for openly declaring his innocence. Later he attached himself to Father Henry Garnet, the superior of the Jesuit mission in England, and served him to the end of his life. He was received into the Society of Jesus as a brother, though it is not known exactly when. He was short and walked with a limp after an accident, and Catholics knew him by the nickname “Little John.”

His work was the hiding places. He traveled with Father Garnet from one Catholic house to another. By day he worked in full view of everyone as an ordinary carpenter, and at night, usually alone, he cut into walls and dug into the earth to make the hiding places in which a priest could wait out a search. Father John Gerard, a Jesuit whom Owen also served, wrote that no one among those who labored in the English vineyard had done more good than he.

In 1594 he was arrested in London together with Father Gerard. Despite torture he betrayed no one and was set free. When Father Gerard was sent to the Tower, Owen, it is believed, helped prepare his escape.

After the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, the authorities began to hunt down the Jesuits. Owen went into hiding with Father Garnet, Father Edward Oldcorne, and Brother Ralph Ashley at Hindlip Hall near Worcester. The house was searched for several days. Hunger forced the two brothers out of their hiding place. They tried to pass for the priests who were being sought, in order to draw attention away from them, but the priests too were soon found. Owen was taken to London, first to the Marshalsea prison and then to the Tower.

The interrogators knew that they had in their hands a man who knew the refuges of priests all over England. He was tortured day after day, hung up by his arms with weights on his feet, yet he said nothing about priests or other Catholics. He died under torture on March 2, 1606. The authorities gave out that he had taken his own life, which Father Gerard denied in his account. Pope Pius XI beatified him on December 15, 1929, and Paul VI canonized him on October 25, 1970, together with thirty-nine other martyrs of England and Wales.