FROM the sands of southern Sudan to the town of Omagh and from the island of Gibraltar to the lakes of Killarney they gathered to honour her contribution to education and the church, writes Sarah Mac Donald.
Some 2,000 representatives of 150 Loreto schools worldwide, educating over 70,000 students, heard Cardinal Seán Brady recall listening to the future Pope Benedict XVI in 1985, when he described her legacy as: “Four centuries of tireless work anchored in faith”.
Of whom was he talking? Mary Ward. Not the 19th-century Irish scientist. Rather, the 17th-century founder of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary – otherwise known in Ireland as the Loreto Sisters, a religious institute which this year celebrates its 400th anniversary.
Mary Ward’s name should be better known. To say she is one of the Catholic Church’s best-kept secrets would be an understatement. A pioneer in women’s education, Mary Ward (1585-1645) was also a divinely inspired advocate of a new way of religious life for women, based on the apostolic model set out by St Ignatius Loyola in the 16th century. She offered an audacious vision of what women could and would do in the Church.
This Yorkshirewoman and her companions came to be known across Europe in the first decades of the 17th century as “the English Ladies” . They founded religious communities and schools in London – where they operated as part of the underground church in an England torn apart by religious strife – as well as in St Omer and Liège, Cologne, Trier, Munich, Bratislava, Vienna, Perugia, Rome and Naples. But the “English Ladies” unnerved many in the Church’s Curia, at a time when some theologians were still pondering whether women had souls capable of apprehending God!
Mary Ward began to be perceived as “dangerous”. Her vision of a self-governing women’s congregation in which the sisters could work beyond the confines of monastic enclosure was in contradiction of the directives laid out for female religious by the Council of Trent, which sought to keep nuns safely behind monastic walls. The “English Ladies” were referred derogatively to as “galloping girls” on account of their freedom.
Eventually, those in the hierarchy who wanted to rid the church of these “Jesuitesses” were successful. A bull of suppression was imposed on Mary Ward’s Institute in 1631, the same year that Galileo was condemned, and she was jailed by the Inquisition as a “heretic, rebel and schismatic”.
She was not deterred. On her release from the filthy cell in Munich where she had been imprisoned, she set out for Rome to meet Pope Urban VIII and answer the criticisms of her institute. (She was one of the great female travellers of the 17th century – during her lifetime she journeyed on foot over the Alps three times despite the Thirty Years War and plague.) But the damage was irreparable: all of her sisters were thrown out of their convents and told to make do as best they could. She died with her life’s work in ruins as the English Civil War raged around her in York in 1645. Paradoxically, it was a Protestant clergyman who was “honest enough to be bribed” and so allowed her few remaining companions to bury her in his graveyard.
Despite church opprobrium, Mary Ward’s death was only the beginning of a long journey of rehabilitation. The oldest active Catholic convent in England is the Bar Convent in York, which was founded in 1686 by one of Mary Ward’s few remaining followers in the late 17th century. It is here that Mary Aikenhead, the Irish founder of the Religious Sisters of Charity, did her initial training in the early 19th century, and one of her fellow novices was Frances Teresa Ball, who set up Mary Ward’s first foundation in Ireland in 1822 at Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham. There is also a link with the Poor Clares in Galway: this goes back to Mary Ward’s very first foundation, a Poor Clare convent in Gravelines in 1608, of which the Galway convent is, through the twists and turns of history, a daughter house.
Perhaps this profound and enduring legacy is what Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who trained as a Loreto Sister in Rathfarnham, had in mind when she wrote that Mary Ward was “God’s gift to the Church and society”. Pope Pius XII described her as “that incomparable woman”. He recognised that, despite all her trials and the shabby treatment meted out to her by the Church, she remained a loyal woman of faith to the end. But it was not until 1909 that Mary Ward’s sisters were granted permission by the Vatican to acknowledge her as their foundress.
Mary Ward’s life challenges easy stereotypes. A seed that was planted 400 years ago continues to flower through the Loreto Sisters and the Congregation of Jesus, from East Timor to Ireland, from Zimbabwe to Sudan. The words of the Inquisition, consequently, ring a little hollow: “We destroy and annul them, we command all Christian faithful to consider them . . . as suppressed, extinct, rooted out, destroyed and abolished”.
It simply must be asked: has wrong, in fact, turned outto be right?