The Parishioner - Edition 24

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God’s Holy Angels Canon Luke Smith Angels are certainly in vogue! We need not look far to find images of winged, white robed creatures on greeting cards, badges, necklaces, ornaments and a whole myriad of other trinkets. Manufacturers are cashing in on the public’s newfound interest in these celestial beings, but how much of what is being presented is fact? A brief foray into what the Church teaches; will help decipher what is fact and what is fiction. The modern fixation with angels tends to centre upon what they look like, treating them like some lucky charm; there is an inherent danger then of relegating them to the realm of fairytale, comforting to imagine they exist, but rationally admitting they cannot really exist or are simply a literary or artistic embellishment. The Church, basing its teaching on both Scripture and Tradition, explains in The Catechism of the Catholic Church (nos. 328-336) that God created the spiritual, non-corporeal (bodiless) beings we call angels; each angel has intelligence and will and is a personal and immortal creature. In simple terms each angel is a unique being created to love and serve God, its Creator. But angels are neither cute and cuddly nor simply good luck talismans. Not all angels chose to do God’s will. “The devil and other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing,” the Catechism says (no. 391), quoting from the writings of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Like human beings the angels were created with free will and some angels sinned; we don’t know exactly what they did wrong, but their ‘fall’was a result of radically and irrevocably rejecting God and His reign. Since humanity’s creation, the devil (himself a fallen angel) and his angels, immortal and powerful, but not all-powerful like God, have sought to lead mankind to also reject their Creator. No human being has been spared this tempting, not even Jesus (see for example Matthew 4:1-11). Angels and humans are ontologically (in their very being) different. Angels are 100% spirit; whilst humans are both spirit (soul) and body. The human soul is immortal; at death the soul leaves the body, but it is not transformed into an angel as some believe. Rather, the purified soul that enters heaven enjoys God’s presence with the angels and joins with the angels and the Communion of saints in praising God. The angels are our constant partners in prayer, the public liturgy of the church is a joining of heaven and earth: ‘the multitude of angels extols you majesty and we are united with them in exultant adoration’ (Preface of the angels from the Roman Missal). We adopt the Heavenly Sanctus as our prayer of adoration in every celebration of the Mass: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts’ (Isaiah 6:3). A theme we find in the psalms too: ‘I will thank you Lord, with all my heart; in the presence of the angels I will praise you’ (Psalm137:1) To return to the point that angels are 100% spirit and therefore do not have a body; we might contest what about the various scriptural accounts of angelic encounter. In the Scriptures the primary focus is always upon the angel’s function not their appearance; angels are never described, only the seraphim and cherubim (e.g. Isaiah 6) have wings. We are left to assume that angels can take human form; in several accounts of angelic encounter only gradually does the one encountering the angel realise there is more than a human being before them (some of the best illustrations of this are Gideon in the book of Judges 6:11-24; the parents of Samson in chapter 13 of the same book and Tobias in the book of Tobit) . ‘Angel’ comes from the Greek rendering of the Hebrew word for ‘messenger’. This is not to reduce the angels to a sort of celestial postal service; May God be with me and with His messenger whom he has sent to greet me and lead me to Heaven. May the Lord who is great and blessed look upon me, have pity on me and grant me peace. May he give me greater strength and courage that I may not be fearful and afraid. For the angels of God are about me and God is with me wherever I may be. A Jewish prayer. they are messengers in the deepest sense of the word, they bear and reflect something of the power and authority of the one who sends them. They deliver God’s word, attest to his presence, deliver, protect and guide; they are also the agents of God’s justice (e.g. Sodom & Gomorrah, Genesis 19 and the book of Revelation). If you want the technical term for all this, they are plenipotentiaries. The notion of guardian angels is a very ancient one, unfortunately the over sentimentalising of this notion and the subsequent images again tend to relegate them to the realm of fairytales. Some of the most ancient narratives in the Old Testament bear witness to the belief in God’s angels watching over and guiding God’s People (e.g. Genesis 24:7 ‘He will send his angel before you’ and Exodus 23:20; 32:34); throughout our lives God’s angels are there offering care and intercession. St. Basil the Great (d379AD) summed it up beautifully when he said: “Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life.” There is so much we do not know about angels and do not need to know. Of their nature they are constantly pointing to their creator, praising him and reflecting him, in a sense they are transparent; we too in a different way bear the image of God and are called to reflect him to others. In a world that is so obsessed with self-image the angels remind us that without God we simply would not exist and that our true value and fulfilment is to be found in who we were created to be, not as some self-constructed facade that might win a moment of worldly accolade and fame. The prince of the fallen angels, ‘Lucifer’ (literally light-bearer) sought to usurp the place of God in arrogance and pride and so ultimately lost his true identity and look where that led! Most angels are not even named (or at least remain unknown to us) and the names of archangels that are known tell us more of their mission than their identity. Michael literally means ‘He who is like God’ ‘he’ is the protector or the face of God, the one who preeminently fights against the devil and his angels who seek to usurp God’s place and deceive mankind. Gabriel, literally means ‘God’s strength’, he delivers the message of salvation, God’s deliverance of his people; whilst Raphael is ‘God’s healing’. Neither do we know, or need to know, how many angels there are; traditionally, angels are said to be divided into various ‘choirs’ derived from biblical terms; since the fourth century, that number has been placed at nine: virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, angels, archangels, cherubim and seraphim. The preoccupation with what angels look like or making them into super-humans is detrimental in the sense that it so often causes us to dismiss them from the realms of reality; a little poetic or artistic licence is fine, even wings to denote that the angels need some mode of transportation from the heavenly to the earthly realm! However let us not be so flippant with the message they convey; the interplay between the heavenly and the earthly is not as remote as we may think. The angels attest that God is truly with us; they proclaimed on that first Christmas night, the Incarnation, the presence of God in flesh, the presence of peace and salvation (Luke 2:9-15). The angels constantly proclaim the supremacy of God, and lead us in humility to bow before Him in adoration and praise; for it is only in this humble receptiveness that we become who we are truly meant to be and consequently end up where we are meant to be. The angels I am sure will not be worried if the current craze for angel merchandise fizzles out; in fact they would probably prefer that we take them and their mission a little more seriously. So let us rest assured that the genuine angels are going to be around for a long time. Whether in or out of vogue, they are, after all, immortal. 6
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558 to 1603) Anglicanism was established by law in England as the nation’s state religion, having been a predominantly Catholic nation under the reign of previous monarchs. Consequently, Catholics were now persecuted and it was into this time of persecution that St. Nicholas Owen was born to impoverished, devout Catholic parents in Oxfordshire, England. Remaining steadfast in their faith, the Owen family would repeatedly pay large sums of money in fines to the authorities rather than attend Anglican church services. As a young boy Nicholas Owen had a deep devotion to Jesus. He was slim and short in stature, only slightly taller than a dwarf. He walked with a limp from a badly set leg, fractured when a horse fell on him, and he suffered from a hernia. At the age of fifteen Nicholas was apprenticed to a local joiner where he learned the skills he would later need to build hiding places for catholic priests, secret rooms that became known as priest holes. He was also a carpenter and stonemason by trade. He later worked in the service of Fr. Henry Garnet, Superior of the English Jesuit Order. In 1580 Nicholas joined the Society of Jesus and became one of the first English Jesuit lay brothers. As Catholic persecutions intensified Catholics were totally forbidden to practice their religion, even possessing rosary beads was prohibited. It was punishable by death for anyone to smuggle a priest back into England having been ordained abroad and it was considered treason if priests were found celebrating Mass in the room of a house. They were immediately arrested, brought to trial and sentenced to a traitor’s death at Tyburn. This meant that priests needed hiding holes. For the next eighteen years, with Fr. Garnet’s approval, Nicholas worked under the name of Little John to conceal his identity and travelled throughout England building hiding holes for priests in the mansions of wealthy Catholic families. He would always begin with a prayer and would receive Holy Communion before constructing the priest holes. The only payment he accepted was a meal from each of the families when he had completed his work. If people insisted on giving him money, Nicholas would distribute the money to priests and people in need. He always worked at night and on his own. He was a strong, skilled craftsman and could break through thick stone walls and floors. He worked as a carpenter by day in the mansions so that the servants would not suspect the true nature of his building at night. He made trap doors and sliding doors, in walls, beneath floors and near roof tops.To conceal the entrances of the priest holes he would use ‘trompe l’oeil’, a realistic technique which made the detection of the entrances difficult to discern, even if someone viewed the entrances close-up. Many stage magicians and illusionists use this technique today. The locations of the secret rooms were known only to himself and the house owners. The number of priest holes Nicholas constructed may never be known as many are thought to be still undiscovered. In 1581 Nicholas was in London helping Jesuit priest Fr. John Gerard when he learned that Fr. Edmund Campion had been arrested while preaching at a manor house in Berkshire. Fr. Campion had been charged with sedition and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Nicholas immediately openly declared Fr. Campion’s innocence of the charge and both he and Fr. Gerard were then arrested and imprisoned separately, Fr. Gerard in the Tower of London and Nicholas at the notorious, decaying Poultry Compter Prison in London, where he was tortured. Although his priest holes were unknown to the persecutors at that time, he did not betray the whereabouts of any priests. Instead he spoke of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin to his interrogators. He was released after a kind, St. Nicholas Owen Written and illustrated by Charlotte Cassidy 7 wealthy Catholic family paid a fine on his behalf. His jailers considered Nicholas nothing more than an insignificant fool and defender of Catholic priests and so he was able to resume his secret work. Because of his ingenious building skills, Nicholas masterminded the famous escape of Fr. Gerard and another prisoner from the Tower of London in 1587. After the ascension to the throne of King James I in 1603 and the failed Gunpowder Plot of November 1605, the king firmly stated there would be no relaxation in the rigorous anti-Catholic persecutions. Realizing he was now suspected of building places of refuge for priests, Nicholas decided to hide at Hindlip Hall in Worcestershire in a priest hole he had constructed. Concerned, however, for the safety of his master, Fr. Garnet, who was hiding with three other priests in a nearby mansion, Nicholas voluntarily gave himself up to the priest hunters after four days, in the hope of distracting attention away from the location of Fr. Garnet and his companions. Nicholas was brought under guard to London and was imprisoned, first in Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, just south of the River Thames. In the solitude of his cell, Nicholas knelt in prayer for some time, drawing strength from his profound love of Jesus. He was then taken to the infamous Tower of London. Although it was illegal under English Law to torture a man if he had a hernia (those suffering from any physical disability were exempt from torture), for a week Nicholas was subjected to horrific torture on the rack for six hours at a time, which forced his hernia and other internal organs to protrude. To contain the protrusions his cruel tormentors strapped a circular plate of iron around his abdomen. The sharp edge of the iron plate combined with the stretching power of the rack caused Nicholas further agonizing pain and injury. Despite this barbaric torture, Nicholas revealed nothing of the priest holes. Eventually he was dragged back to his cell were he died in the night between the 1st and 2nd of March 1606. He was only forty-four. Fr. Gerard, the priest he had helped to escape from the Tower of London in 1587, was extremely saddened by the news of Nicholas’s death and he wrote of him with esteem, “I verily think no man can be said to have done more good of all those who labored in the English vineyard. He was the immediate occasion of saving the lives of many hundreds of persons, both ecclesiastical and secular.” In a letter written by Fr. Garnet, before his gruesome execution at Tyburn in 1606, he praised Nicholas Owen’s faithfulness, generous nature and remarkable skill as a carpenter. St. Nicholas Owen was canonized in Rome in 1970 by Pope Paul VI. He is honoured by the Catholic Church in England and Wales for his sanctity and martyrdom and he is regarded as one of the greatest Englishmen of his time. Numerous beautiful examples of his skilled craftsmanship as a carpenter and also his priest’s holes can be seen in many mansions throughout England today. An engraving of Hindlip House (1800), built before 1575 and demolished in 1820.
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Page 9 and 10: My Computer as a Place Len Watson I
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Page 15: BAPTISMS July 2014 Ana Hughes, Lind

The Parishioner - Edition 24

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