Mary Ward - a Catholic heroine
By Sr Gemma Simmonds CJ
In 1951 Pope Pius XII called Mary Ward, ‘that incomparable woman, given to the church by Catholic England in her darkest and bloodiest hour’. In 1631 his predecessor Urban VIII issued a papal Bull condemning her and her sisters as ‘poisonous growths in the Church of God [which] must be torn up from the roots lest they spread themselves further’. Born in 1585, Mary Ward belonged, like fellow Yorkshire woman Margaret Clitherow, to an underground Catholic network, working collaboratively with itinerant priests to maintain the persecuted faith. In the absence of clergy she and many recusant women exercised spiritual and practical authority within their communities. Despite the Council of Trent’s ruling that all female religious should be enclosed, Mary became convinced that God was calling her to another way of life unheard of in the church. In 1609 she led a group of young women to Flanders to begin a consecrated life on the Jesuit model.
They set up educational and pastoral ministries across Europe, characterised by Jesuit mobility and missionary focus, attracting admirers and enemies in equal measure. Mary crossed the Alps on foot through plague and war to petition for papal approbation, but church and society were not prepared for such innovations. Accusations arose of arrogance and immorality, of women aspiring to priestly roles. A Jesuit remarked that, while Mary Ward’s ‘English Ladies’ were remarkable for their fervour, ‘when all is done, they are but women’, so they were bound to fail. Mary insisted instead that ‘there is no such difference between men and women, that women may not do great things’.
Her communities were ruthlessly suppressed and in 1631 she was imprisoned as a ‘heretic, schismatic and rebel to Holy Church’. She returned to England, dying during the Civil War in 1645. Her surviving sisters clung on to her memory and her vision, founding the Bar Convent, England’s oldest religious house, in 1686. In the nineteenth century Irishwoman Teresa Ball trained there before making further pioneering foundations which spread worldwide as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary or Loreto Sisters. Formal vindication came only in 1909, when Mary was at last recognized as one of England’s great Catholic heroines. Today she is honoured and studied as an English woman writer, a pioneering educator and above all as an apostolic woman who loved the church but challenged it to think and act beyond its own theological categories.
Image:
From the Painted Life of Mary Ward - Mary Ward and her first companions setting out for St. Omer in 1609.
© Studio Tanner, D-8964 Nesselwang