Mary Ward

Mary Ward was born on 23 January 1585 at Mulwith, near Ripon in Yorkshire, into a recusant Catholic gentry family during the penal era in England. Her father was Marmaduke Ward and her mother Ursula Wright of Plowland in Holderness. The Wards and Wrights paid heavily for remaining Catholic: relatives were fined, imprisoned, and in some cases executed, and her maternal grandmother spent many years in prison for harbouring priests. Two of her uncles, John and Christopher Wright, were among those killed in connection with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Formed in this climate of clandestine faith, she was drawn from youth to religious life and to some form of apostolic service rather than a purely contemplative vocation.

In 1606 she crossed to the Spanish Netherlands and entered the Poor Clares at St Omer as a lay sister, but she soon concluded that enclosed Franciscan life was not her calling. After leaving the convent she gathered English companions and in 1609 founded a new community at St Omer devoted especially to the education of girls. She came to understand her institute as following, for women, the same path as the Society of Jesus: unenclosed, mobile, under a superior general, and engaged in active works of teaching and catechesis. That design conflicted with the post-Tridentine insistence that women religious be strictly cloistered, and it made her project both influential and highly controversial. Houses were established in succeeding years at Liège, Cologne, Trier, Rome, Naples, Munich, Vienna, and Pressburg, and her companions became known in some places as the English Ladies.

Mary Ward spent much of her adult life travelling across Catholic Europe to found communities, open schools, and seek papal confirmation of her Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Opposition from some clergy, from local authorities, and from those who regarded an unenclosed female congregation as a threat to discipline culminated in 1631, when Pope Urban VIII suppressed the Institute by the bull Pastoralis Romani Pontificis. She was detained for a period in Munich. After her release she was received in Rome and later returned to England, where she continued to live with a small circle of companions during the English Civil War. She died at Heworth, near York, on 20 January 1645 and was buried in the churchyard of St Thomas at Osbaldwick, an Anglican parish burial being the practical option available to Catholics at that time.

Although the original Institute was suppressed, communities that derived from her work, notably in Bavaria, survived in altered form. In later centuries her foundation was reconstituted and eventually recognised, with Mary Ward acknowledged as foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Loreto) and of the Congregation of Jesus. Pope Pius X allowed her to be honoured as foundress in the early twentieth century, and in 2009 Pope Benedict XVI declared her Venerable. She has not been beatified or canonized. Her historical importance lies in pioneering an active, educational apostolate for women religious and in insisting that women could live a Jesuit-inspired common life without enclosure, a model that later became widely accepted in the Catholic Church.