St. Margaret Clitherow was born in Middleton, England, in 1555, of protestant parents. Possessed of good looks and full of wit and merriment, she was a charming personality. In 1571, she married John Clitherow, a well-to-do grazier and butcher (to whom she bore two children), and a few years later entered the Catholic Church. Her zeal
led her to harbor fugitive priests, for which she was arrested and
imprisoned by hostile authorities. Recourse was had to every means in an
attempt to make her deny her Faith, but the holy woman
stood firm. Finally, she was condemned to be pressed to death on March
25, 1586. She was stretched out on the ground with a sharp rock on her
back and crushed under a door over laden with unbearable weights. Her
bones were broken and she died within fifteen minutes. The humanity and holiness of this servant of God
can be readily glimpsed in her words to a friend when she learned of
her condemnation: "The sheriffs have said that I am going to die this
coming Friday; and I feel the weakness of my flesh which is troubled at
this news, but my spirit rejoices greatly. For the love of God, pray for me and ask all good people to do likewise." Her feast day is March 26th.
More about St. Margaret Clitherow from Wikipedia
Saint Margaret Clitherow (1556 – 25 March 1586) is an English saint and martyr of the Roman Catholic Church.[2] She is sometimes called "the Pearl of York".Contents
- 1 Life
- 2 Canonisation
- 3 Further reading
- 4 See also
- 5 References
- 6 External links
- 6.1 Margaret
- 6.2 Children
- 6.3 Places
Life
She was born as Margaret Middleton,[3] the daughter of a wax-chandler, after Henry VIII of England had split the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. She married John Clitherow, a butcher, in 1571 (at the age of 15) and bore him three children. She converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of 18, in 1574. Her husband John was supportive (he having a brother who was Roman Catholic clergy), though he remained Protestant.[4] She then became a friend of the persecuted Roman Catholic population in the north of England. Her son, Henry, went to Reims to train as a Roman Catholic priest. She regularly held Masses in her home in the Shambles in York. There was a hole cut between the attics of her house and the adjoining house, to enable a priest to escape in the event of a raid. A house in the Shambles once thought to have been her home, now called the Shrine of the Saint Margaret Clitherow, is open to the public (it is served by the nearby Church of St Wilfrid's and is part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Middlesbrough); her actual house (10 and 11, the Shambles) is further down the street.In 1586, she was arrested and called before the York assizes for the crime of harbouring Roman Catholic priests. She refused to plead to the case so as to prevent a trial that would entail her children being made to testify, and therefore being subjected to torture. As a result she was executed by being crushed to death – the standard inducement o force a plea; on Good Friday 1586.[5] The two sergeants who should have killed her hired four desperate beggars to kill her. She was stripped and had a handkerchief tied across her face then laid out upon a sharp rock the size of a man's fist, the door from her own house was put on top of her and slowly loaded with an immense weight of rocks and stones (the small sharp rock would break her back when the heavy rocks were laid on top of her). Her death occurred within fifteen minutes but her body was left for six hours before the weight was removed. After her death her hand was removed, and this relic is now housed in the chapel of the Bar Convent, York. Following her execution, Elizabeth I wrote to the citizens of York expressing her horror at the treatment of a woman. Because of her sex, she argued, Clitherow should not have been executed.[citation needed]
Commemorative plaque on the Ouse Bridge, York
Canonisation
She was beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI and canonised in 1970 by Pope Paul VI along with other martyrs from England and Wales. The group of candidates canonised at that time is commonly called "The Forty Martyrs of England and Wales". Her feast day in the current Roman Catholic calendar, together with the other English martyrs, is 4 May. However her feast day in England is 30 August, which she shares with fellow female martyrs St. Anne Line and St. Margaret Ward.A number of schools in England are named after Margaret Clitherow, including schools at Bracknell, Brixham, Manchester, Nottingham, Thamesmead SE28, Brent, London NW10 and Tonbridge. The Roman Catholic primary school in Nottingham's Bestwood estate is named after Clitherow. In the United States, St Margaret of York Church and School in Loveland, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, is also named after her. Another school named after her is St. Margaret Clitherow RC Primary School, located next to Stevenage Borough Football Club.
She is also the patroness of the Catholic Women's League, an organisation of Catholic women founded in 1906, with small groups (known as branches) and sections (groupings of branches, usually along diocesan lines) across the world. A group of parishes in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Liverpool, Sacred Heart in Hindsford, St Richard's in Atherton, Holy Family in Boothstown, St Ambrose Barlow in Astley, St Gabriel's, Higher Folds in Leigh are now united as a single community with St Margaret Clitherow as its patron.[7][8]
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