Mary Ward founds the Institute at Saint-Omer

Some institutions are founded by men who command armies, and some by women who refuse a wall. The cloister, after the Council of Trent, was the only door open to a woman who wanted to give her life to God; everything else had been locked, bricked over, declared improper. To propose another door was not to argue with stone but with a whole settled habit of mind in Rome. It took a daughter of the English recusancy, raised in houses where Mass was said in attics and priests slept behind panels, to notice that the lock did not in fact hold.

THE YORKSHIRE INHERITANCE

She is Mary Ward, born at Mulwith in the West Riding on 23 January 1585, daughter of Ulrick Ward of Mulwith and Newby and Ursula Wright of Plowland. The household she grew up in is one of the small recusant gentry families that the Penal Laws of the Elizabethan settlement set out to dismantle: fines for not attending the Anglican parish, sequestrations of land, the priest-hunter at the door. After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 the screw tightens further, and the recusant cousinage of the West Riding, the Wrights and Babthorpes and Vauxes, becomes a network of safe houses and burned books. She is taught to think of religion as something kept under a floorboard. In 1606 she crosses to Saint-Omer, in the Spanish Netherlands, where the exiled English have made a second Yorkshire of presses, schools and seminaries. She tries the Poor Clares at Saint-Omer, then founds a house for English Poor Clares at Gravelines. Neither cloister will hold her. She has begun to understand, without yet daring to say it, that the work she is for is not behind a grille.

THE RUE DE SAINTE-CROIX

Autumn 1609. The Flemish light falls late and slantwise through the western casements of the rented townhouse on the Rue de Sainte-Croix. The city is governed for the Spanish Habsburgs; the bells run on Roman time. Below her windows, English voices: girls from Lancashire, from the West Riding, from the Pale of Dublin, whose families have sent them across the Channel because there is no Catholic schooling left at home. Father Roger Lee, of the Society of Jesus, comes and goes through the front door without disguise, a thing impossible in York. On her table lie the draft constitutions she has been working at for eighteen months, drawn up in consultation with the English Jesuit college: an order of women modelled on the Society itself, uncloistered, mobile, English-speaking, accountable directly to the Pope. She has the seven names too, written out in her own hand: Winifred Wigmore, Susan Rookwood, Mary Poyntz, Catherine Smith, Joyce Vaux, Margaret Horde, Barbara Babthorpe. Yorkshire and Suffolk and the Pale. Daughters of houses where the priest came in by night.

THE SECOND OF DECISION

The objection she has rehearsed against herself for two years is the strongest one. The Council of Trent, in 1563, closed off every uncloistered form of women's religious life that the medieval Church had once allowed; the canon law of her own century stands against what she is about to do. To found a women's institute without enclosure, without choir, without the grille, on the constitutions of a male order, is not a reform within the rules. It is a proposal that the rules have mistaken the work. She knows this. She also knows the parish she comes from. The English Catholic women of the recusant generation cannot be served by sisters who never leave a building; they need teachers who can travel, catechists who can sit at a kitchen table in Holderness and not be noticed. There is no such difference between men and women that women may not do great matters, she will say later, in the Saint-Omer years, defending what she has begun. The sentence is not yet on paper this afternoon. What is on paper is a constitution that contradicts a council. She lifts the pen and does not strike anything out. The decision is made in the space between two breaths, and it is the decision to trust an observed fact about her own people over a settled habit of canon law. Take the same of the Society, she has noted in her own hand of the rule she means to adopt; she does not soften the phrase.

THE FEAST OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

On the morning of 8 December 1609, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the seven gather in the house on the Rue de Sainte-Croix. Father Roger Lee says the Mass. The simple vows of the new Institute are made, in English, in a room with whitewashed walls and a north window. They wear no habit that marks them out on the street; they wear the dark dress of respectable Flemish widows. On Monday, 11 January 1610, a school for English Catholic girls opens in the same house. It charges fees from the daughters of the gentry who can pay, and takes for free the daughters of the priest-hunted who cannot. Within a year there are pupils in two languages. Within a decade there are houses at Liège, Cologne, Trier, Rome, Vienna, Munich and Pressburg, each opened by women who have travelled, under their own authority, across a Europe still at war over what Mary Ward is doing.

THE ROOM IN ROME

The complaint reaches the Curia by the late 1620s. Uncloistered women, teaching in public, governed by a woman, not subject to the local bishop: every clause of it offends a careful reader of Trent. They are called, in the Roman correspondence, the Jesuitesses, and the word is not meant kindly. On 13 January 1631 Pope Urban VIII issues the bull Pastoralis Romani Pontificis, suppressing the Institute by name. Houses are closed across the empire; the constitutions are condemned. Mary Ward, in Munich, is arrested at the Anger Convent in February 1631 by officers of the Inquisition and held there for nine weeks as a heretic, schismatic and rebel against the Church. From her sickbed in the convent she writes, in lemon juice between the lines of an ordinary letter, to her companions: she is not to despair, the work is of God, the suppression is of men. She secures a personal audience with Urban VIII on her release and tells him, by the record of her own account, that she has never been a heretic in thought or word. The Pope receives her courteously and does not restore the Institute.

THE RETURN TO HEWORTH

She comes back to England in 1639, an old woman by the reckoning of her century, and settles at Heworth Hall outside York, in the country she had left as a girl. The English Civil War breaks over the city in 1644. She dies at Heworth on 30 January 1645, fifty-nine years old, the Institute still under canonical suppression, her name still officially that of a condemned woman. The Yorkshire parish at Osbaldwick, where Anglican law required she be buried, takes her in; a sympathetic minister is found, and her gravestone, when it is at last set up, gives her age and her piety and no order. The Institute is restored on a modified, partially cloistered footing in 1703, and again, more fully, in 1877; her own constitutions are formally approved by Rome only in 1877, two hundred and sixty-eight years after the morning on the Rue de Sainte-Croix. She is beatified in 2009, on the four hundredth anniversary of the foundation. The successor congregations, the Loreto Sisters and the Congregation of Jesus, run schools today on six continents; the active women's apostolic congregations of the nineteenth century, the Sisters of Mercy and the Daughters of Charity among them, build on the door she insisted was open.

Some doors, once they are walked through, cannot be locked again, however the keys are turned. The work she founded outlasted the bull that suppressed it by more than three centuries and the woman who founded it by exactly that long. At Osbaldwick the gravestone still stands, weathered now, against the wall of the small churchyard outside York: a plain slab giving her name, her age and the date of her death, and no order at all.