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About St Mary’s

Recognition At Last

by Gemma Simmonds, CJ

Mary Ward’s vision of a Jesuit order for women has found expression in a change of name. Could her dream — of equality in the Church — come true after 400 years?

There are three things that the Holy Spirit doesn’t know, runs an old joke: how much money the Franciscans have, what the Jesuits are really up to and the names of all the women’s religious congregations. This week the Roman branch of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, founded by a Yorkshirewoman, Mary Ward, added to the confusion by becoming the Congregation of Jesus. Re–branding is no easy matter, as the Royal Mail found to its cost in its failed attempt to become known as Consignia. But this is no cosmetic exercise. The change is the culmination of a 400–year long struggle to find acceptance for the attempt, in the hostile climate of the 1600s, to found an unenclosed order of women on the Jesuit model.

The Society of Jesus, with its mobility, central government, freedom from the restrictions of monastic structures and aim to be “contemplatives in action”, “finding God in all things”, rather than in withdrawal from the world, was a major influence on the Ward family, then struggling, like most English recusants, to maintain their faith under persecution. While the men in the family network schemed for the political restoration of Catholicism — three of Mary Ward’s uncles died in the Gunpowder Plot — the women dreamt of another kingdom altogether. In 1609 she led a group of them overseas to begin a consecrated life without enclosure, but with no greater clarity as to their future. With two failed attempts at life as a Poor Clare behind her, she was besieged with advice from “learned fathers” to become a Carmelite or an Ursuline, but above all to submit to the Council of Trent’s insistence that religious women be strictly enclosed. But in 1611, she was told in a vision to “Take the same of the Society”, and understood that her companions were to live by the Jesuit Constitutions, call themselves the Society of Jesus and model themselves on the mobility and missionary focus of the sons of St Ignatius — while remaining independent from them.

The task was fraught with difficulties on all sides. Trent permitted no relaxation of enclosure for women, and St Ignatius had insisted that the Jesuits were never to take responsibility for women religious. Although Mary Ward’s sister Barbara and several early companions are buried in the English College in Rome, and held in honour there, some of the secular clergy of her day were hostile to the Jesuits. They referred to the new congregation as “Jesuitesses”, hating and fearing what they represented. Above all, society considered women incapable of doing good to themselves, let alone to others, and was not prepared for someone who taught her sisters that “there is no such difference between men and women, that women may not do great things”. When a priest told her that “he would not for a thousand worlds be a woman, because a woman could not apprehend God”, she bit back the retort she could have made “by the experience I have of the contrary"; instead she bemoaned the “lack of experience” that lay behind his judgement. A Jesuit remarked that, while the “English Ladies” were remarkable for their fervour, “when all is done, they are but women”, and their new venture was therefore bound to fail. “Women in time to come will do much”, Mary indignantly repeated.

One priest whose experience of the perilous English mission did teach him the vital apostolic role that women could play was the Jesuit John Gerard, who famously escaped from the Tower of London after prolonged torture. Gerard lent Mary Ward his copy of the Jesuit Constitutions, from which she copied her own proposed rule, “that only excepted which God by diversity of sex hath prohibited” — what was strictly reserved to priests, in other words. New companions flocked to her: communities and schools sprang up from London to Prague, from Bratislava and Cologne to Perugia. Convinced of God’s inspiration and armed with the Ignatian Constitutions, she walked over the Alps to Rome — amid the Thirty Years War and outbreaks of plague — to present her plan to the Pope. But her many enemies had reached him first, and after repeated attempts to persuade him failed, Urban VIII issued a Bull of Suppression against Mary Ward’s fledgling congregation. In language whose violence remains shocking today it condemned her refusal to accept the moral and intellectual fragility of women and her arrogance in attempting spiritual tasks unsuited to the weaker sex. She was imprisoned as a “heretic, rebel and schismatic” in 1631, the same year that Galileo was condemned. Mary died in York in 1645 during the English Civil War. Her tombstone in the Anglican church in Osbaldwick bears a coded reference to her determination that women might also take inspiration from St Ignatius: “To love the poore, persever in the same, live, dy and rise with them was all the ayme of Mary Ward”.

To “Take the same of the Society” has been long in coming. Her few remaining companions continued to live under her inspiration, but Rome was not certain that she had “repented of her crimes”; approval for a much–diluted form of the Jesuit Constitutions was only permitted on condition that the “English Ladies” repudiated Mary Ward as foundress. The sisters were forbidden to display in public the famous Painted Life, a series of 50 paintings illustrating her life and spirituality, and were pressurised to destroy letters, portraits and documents referring to her. Various bishops permitted foundations in their dioceses on condition that they had final jurisdiction over the general superior. This restriction caused a series of heated controversies until 1749, when Pope Benedict XIV made a landmark ruling in canonical history, for the first time opening up the possibility that women religious might enjoy the same apostolic mobility as men.

It took nearly three hundred years to gain final Papal approval of Mary Ward’s plan, but it was not until 1979 that the Jesuit Constitutions could be adopted. Even then, reference to women as spiritual directors, and the Jesuit characteristics of a vow of direct obedience to the Pope for the sake of mission and manifestation of conscience were not permitted. Only last year did it became possible to adopt the full Constitutions and with them a name close to that envisaged by Mary Ward.

Not everyone will welcome this change. Some past pupils and friends of the Roman branch’s Mary Ward schools see this as another step away from a fast–disappearing tradition. Some still question the implications of committing themselves to a rule whose structures reflect the male–oriented and hierarchical culture of the Tridentine era, when Mary Ward’s story embodies so much that Catholic women are still struggling with today.

But Sr Jane Livesey, provincial superior of the Congregation of Jesus in England, believes the name change is not about trying to recapture the past. “It’s about truth, about taking Mary Ward’s vision completely on board,” she believes. Mary Ward’s sense that holiness resides in “doing ordinary things well” is typical of the Yorkshire approach to life, and a crucial part of her legacy. “We still have a long way to go before everyone shares her dream of a more inclusive Church,” says Sr Jane. “But for us this is at least a step in the right direction.”

As a gesture for the new millennium, the Vatican apologised for its treatment of Galileo. No one in the Congregation of Jesus is holding her breath for a similar gesture towards England’s own earth–shaker. But the new name says it in so many words.

Republished by kind permission of Sr Gemma Simmonds and The Tablet (where it was first published on 7th Feb 2004).