Sunday Homily, 16 November 2025 - Fr Paul Rowse, OP
- paulrowse
- Nov 16
- 3 min read
Well might we wonder whether the Lord’s words about persecution came to mind as the martyrs met their fate: persecuted and seized, betrayed and tried, hated and killed. During the English Reformation, there was a woman to whom all of that happened and more. We call her Saint Margaret Clitherow.
St Margaret married a widower with two sons, and with him had three children. At the age of 18 Margaret converted to Catholicism. Her new faith brought her difficulties almost from the beginning. She was arrested and tried at the age of 21 for not attending Church of England services. The family paid the fines for her recusancy. But non-conformity was the least of her crimes.
Margaret’s offence was that she hid priests. She hid them in the family home, and in a rented accommodation nearby, and in a local pub. Her husband, John, although he was a prominent businessman about town, also had a brother a priest. They attracted the attention of the authorities when their eldest son Henry disappeared, left Protestant England for the safety of France to become a priest.
And so, on the tenth of March 1586, the Clitherow house was raided and Margaret arrested. The authorities found the priest hole where their fugitive guests were sometimes hidden when a terrified boy betrayed her secret. Margaret’s final imprisonment lasted two years. She used the time to learn to read the Latin Missal and recite its responses by heart.
From her prison cell, Margaret saw the danger ahead for her family. Knowing that her children could be forced to testify and could be subjected to torture, she refused to enter a plea. Her eloquence at the end is astounding for its supernatural origin. She simply said: “I know of no offense whereof I should confess myself guilty. Having made no offence, I need no trial.”
The capital punishment for those who do not plead was terrifying. The authorities tore off the front door of her home, lay her down under it stripped naked with a small sharp stone under her back, and laid 50kgs weights on her one-by-one. She lasted fifteen minutes. Thus, Mrs Margaret Clitherow, the Pearl of York, suffered death on the twenty-fifth of March 1586. She was 30 years of age, pregnant with her fourth child. It was Good Friday.
“You will be hated by all men on account of my name, but not a hair of your head will be lost.” So says the Lord to his disciples. The glory of these words is twofold.
Firstly, the Lord has foreseen the disciples’ fate. As with his own betrayal, arrest, torture, and death, the Lord has foreseen all that will happen to us. So, it’s not the case that the persecution of the Church takes the Lord by surprise, or that his mission is thwarted by the misadventure of its servants. The entire story of humanity is already known to him. But this is not enough. It’s not enough for the Lord simply to foreknow our persecution to elicit our perseverance.
So, secondly, he forewarns us. He forewarns us so that we know that what is happening to us isn’t undoing his work in us. Our suffering doesn’t void his suffering for us. His life isn’t prevented from coursing through us because we have died.
This is how it works for us: Christ’s majesty is unassailable. He cannot be unseated by the potentates of the day when they come for us. On the contrary, suffering is the sign of the Church. They don’t come for watered down versions of himself. They come for his witnesses.
All the talk about the fate of the Jerusalem Temple and the great wars can seem so remote to us. We have never known the Temple in action; we’ve never known the horror of animal sacrifice to honour the one true God. Neither have we known revolution in this country. The last world war was eighty years ago. Thank God for that.
But there is trouble ahead. And whatever sort it is, personal, public, or both – as it was for St Margaret of York – the Lord foresees it and forewarns us. It needn’t catch us by surprise. We may not fare better than our master.
What is needed is perseverance. The resurrection is assured. The victory already won. The prize of life laid away. All we need to do is take the next step. There’s much which can be worried about or predicted. But all that’s asked of us is another step forward.
Fr Paul Rowse, OP Parish Priest
