Ward · 1609
Mary Ward founds the Institute at Saint-Omer
In the autumn of 1609 the Yorkshire Catholic Mary Ward, twenty-four years old, daughter of the Catholic recusant Ulrick Ward of Mulwith and Newby and Ursula Wright of Plowland, founded at the Flemish exiled-English Catholic colony of Saint-Omer in the Spanish Netherlands the first uncloistered women's religious order in the post-Reformation Catholic Church. The new Institute (the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on the Jesuit-male-order model) was founded on the principle that English Catholic women refugees from the post-1559 Elizabethan recusancy crisis could form an active, mobile, teaching-and-pastoral religious community rather than enter the contemplative cloistered orders that were the only female religious option available under the post-Tridentine reform legislation. The foundation was the senior post-Reformation development in the history of Catholic women's religious life and is the foundational moment of the modern Catholic women's apostolic religious congregations that run from Saint-Omer 1609 through to the Sister-of-Mercy and Daughter-of-Charity female religious orders of the nineteenth century.
It is the late autumn of 1609 in the rented Saint-Omer townhouse on the Rue de Sainte-Croix at the centre of the Flemish Spanish-Habsburg-administered city, in the continental winter light through the western casements. She is twenty-four years old. She is Mary Ward, born at Mulwith in the West Riding of Yorkshire on 23 January 1585, daughter of the Catholic recusant Ulrick Ward of Mulwith and Newby and Ursula Wright of Plowland, raised in the dense small West-Yorkshire Catholic-recusant gentry community of the post-1585-Babington-conspiracy-and-1605-Gunpowder-Plot Elizabethan-and-Jacobean penal-laws period.
On the table in front of her are the draft constitutions of the new Institute, drafted by her across the preceding eighteen months at the senior English-Jesuit-college consultation at the Saint-Omer Jesuit seminary that Father John Gerard of the post-1606-Gunpowder-Plot escape was running across the Flemish exiled-English Catholic community of the period. The constitutions propose: an active, uncloistered, teaching-and-pastoral women's religious order modelled on the Society-of-Jesus male Jesuit constitutional structure, with mobile members rather than enclosed conventuals, with an English-language pastoral-and-educational mission focus, and with direct accountability to the Pope rather than to the territorial bishops.
She thinks: the English Catholic recusant women of the post-1559 penal-laws period have no working religious-life option except the Flemish-and-French enclosed cloistered orders. The small post-Tridentine reform legislation of 1563 closed every working uncloistered female religious-life option that the medieval Church had supported.
She thinks: the Institute I am proposing inverts the post-Tridentine female-religious-life closure. The Institute will run mobile, uncloistered, English-language, active-pastoral mission work back into the Elizabethan-recusant English Catholic community across the post-1606 penal-laws period.
She gathers the first community of seven women (Winifred Wigmore, Susan Rookwood, Mary Poyntz, Catherine Smith, Joyce Vaux, Margaret Horde, Barbara Babthorpe) at the Saint-Omer Rue de Sainte-Croix townhouse on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December 1609. The small community takes the simple vows of the new Institute on the Saint-Omer ceremony of that morning under the chaplaincy of Father Roger Lee SJ. The small Institute opens a school for English Catholic recusant girls at the Saint-Omer house on the Monday morning of 11 January 1610.
The small Institute spreads across the Catholic-continental-European houses of the 1610s and 1620s (Liège 1616, Cologne 1621, Trier 1623, Rome 1622, Vienna 1627, Munich 1627, Pressburg 1628) on the senior pastoral-and-educational mission expansion of the post-1609 working foundation period. Mary Ward is summoned to Rome in 1631 for the senior post-1629 small Roman-Curia inquisitorial-investigation of the unusual uncloistered female religious-life model; the Institute is formally suppressed by Pope Urban VIII on 13 January 1631 on the senior small Curial-orthodox post-Tridentine cloistered-female-religious-life canonical orthodoxy. She is imprisoned at the Munich Anger Convent for nine weeks in 1631 before her release on the Pope-Urban-VIII personal-audience appeal. She returns to Yorkshire in 1639 and dies at the Heworth Hall outside York on 30 January 1645 at fifty-nine. The small Institute is restored on a modified-and-cloistered canonical basis in 1703, expands across the post-1703 European-Catholic-women's-religious-life period, and is the senior foundation-of-modern-Catholic-women's-active-religious-congregations on which the post-1815 Sisters-of-Mercy and the post-1633 Daughters-of-Charity-of-Saint-Vincent-de-Paul active-female-religious-orders are subsequently built. The small Mary Ward apostolic-women-religious-life tradition is now run continuously across the Loreto Sisters and the Congregation of Jesus successor-orders.