Day 30, GLORIOUS, Tuesday July 28

St. Margaret Clitherow, Pearl of York

Let us follow the example of the martyrs, and cling tenaciously and with great resolve to the Faith of our Fathers.  The response of St. Margaret Clitherow to her persecutors in the Elizabethan persecution of the Church: 

“I am fully resolved in all things touching my faith which I ground upon Jesus Christ and by Him I steadfastly believe to be saved which faith I acknowledge to be the same that He left to His Apostles and they to their successors from time to time and is taught in the Catholic Church through all Christendom and promised to remain with her unto the world's end and hell gates shall not prevail against it and by God's assistance I mean to live and die in the same faith: for if an angel come from heaven and preach any other doctrine than we have received the Apostle biddeth us not believe him. Therefore if I should follow your doctrine, I should disobey the Apostle's commandment. Wherefore I pray you take this for an answer and trouble me no more for my conscience.”

Saint Margaret Clitherow (1556 – 25 March 1586) is an English saint and martyr.  She is sometimes called "the Pearl of York".  She was born as Margaret Middleton, 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 18) and bore him three children. She converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of 21, in 1574. Her husband John was supportive (he having a brother who was Roman Catholic clergy), though he remained Protestant. 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.

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 to force a plea, on Good Friday 1586.[5] The two sergeants who should have killed her hired four desperate beggars to do it instead. 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. (From Wikipedia article, Margaret Clitherow)