Catholicism is a big tent with an eclectic communion of saints, which probably explains why we’d have Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, a Capuchin stigmatist and bilocator, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the levitator, who is the patron saint of air crews, students, aviators and test takers, St. Denis of Paris, the head-carrying cephalophore, and St. Nicholas Owen, all in the same room happily together. G. K. Chesterton, who may some day join them, would probably heartily approve.
March 22 was the Feast Day of St.Nicholas Owen, who was martyred in 1606. He was canonized by Blessed Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. I learned this, as I have much in a similar vein over the years, from Franciscan Media, formerly St. Anthony Messenger Press, in Cincinnati, and their “Saint of the Day,” which offers a brief biography of a well-known, or a little-known saint. “Catholic saints are holy and human people who lived extraordinary lives,” says Franciscan Media. “Each saint the Church honors responded to God’s invitation to use his or her unique gifts.” Franciscan Media Productions, which produces Saint of the Day (yes, there is a smartphone app) is a ministry of Franciscan Media, sponsored by the Franciscan Friars of the Province of St. John the Baptist in Cincinnati.
Established by the Franciscan Friars in the 1890s, “with the foundational belief that everyone deserves to experience a deep, heart-felt relationship with God, Franciscan Media supports spiritual development by providing inspiring, practical, and helpful multimedia resources in the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi,” they got their start with St. Anthony Messenger magazine in 1893. Franciscan Media conducts its publishing ministry with the official ecclesiastical approval of Archbishop Dennis M. Schnurr, ninth archbishop of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, who succeeded to the office in December 2009.
St. Nicholas Owen, familiarly known as “Little John,” was “small in stature but big in the esteem of his fellow Jesuits,” reports Saint of the Day.
“Born at Oxford, this humble artisan saved the lives of many priests and laypersons in England during the penal times, 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.”
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.”
He was arrested and tortured in 1594 and again in 1606, when he was martyred.
As I said, Chesterton would no doubt approve of this diverse panoply of saints gathered together in one communion and no doubt join them at table. This is the convert to Catholicism after all who wrote: “[W]e should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.” Privately, he joked, “One pint is enough, two pints is one too many, three pints isn’t half enough.”
Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936. Under the influence of his wife Frances, he became an Anglican and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922.
Pope Francis, it turns out, had been a member of the Chesterton Society in Argentina and had approved a prayer for his beatification. Pope Francis was also a member of an honorary committee of a conference for the Argentine Chesterton Society and celebrated a mass for the conference. He owns several books written by Chesterton.
In September 2013, Bishop Peter Doyle, bishop of the Diocese of Northampton, appointed Canon John Udris, a priest of the diocese and currently spiritual director at St Mary’s College, Oscott, to undertake a fact-finding exercise on his behalf into whether a cause for Chesterton’s canonization should be opened. Udris in due course will submit a dossier to the bishop on whether to open the cause for Chesterton’s canonization.
As Udris told the Catholic Herald in an interview a year ago in March 2014, Chesterton, one of the most important Catholic writers and apologists for the faith of the 20th century, is “potentially a huge model” for the Church who “breaks the mould of conventional holiness.”
Udris noted Chesterton, a married layman, was not conventionally devout and could show Catholics “you don’t have to say your rosary every five minutes to be holy.” The first stages of a canonization cause include collecting evidence of heroic virtue.
Instead, Udris suggested, “Chesterton’s holiness could be found in his humour, his charity and his humility.” His defence of the faith in particular, Udris said, “was a model for Catholics.”
Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, and a former Baptist who converted to Catholicism, said in 2013 the idea that someone like Chesterton could be a saint attracted him to the Catholic Church: “The fact that a 300-pound, cigar-smoking journalist might be a saint of the Catholic Church made me understand what the communion of saints is all about. They’re not just one particular type of person.”
Exactly so. Did Chesterton lead a perfect life? Hardly. His excessive enjoyment of food and drink exhibited a distinct lack of temperance, the cardinal moral virtue “that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it. As well, some of his utterances, contemporaneous with his times, clearly sound anti-Semitic to the modern ear. There should be no whitewashing of Chesterton’s life.
Saints, we are reminded time and again, lead holy, but not always conventionally holy, and never perfect lives. They were human beings before they were saints.
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