There are a lot of famous Jesuit saints, many of whom you know by just one name: Ignatius, Xavier, Canisius, Gonzaga, the list goes on. But there are countless holy Jesuits (and other Ignatian-inspired women and men of faith) whose incredible stories aren’t as well-known. Despite their lower profiles, their lives of heroic virtue can inspire us today as we seek to follow Christ more closely. So we asked the writer Meg Hunter-Kilmer to introduce us to 10 of these “friends of Ignatius.”
Hunter-Kilmer is a renowned American Catholic writer whose work on saints has been featured in her books “Saints Around the World” and “Pray for Us: 75 Saints Who Sinned, Suffered, and Struggled on Their Way to Holiness.” She picked 10 women and men from the wide Ignatian family whose causes for sainthood have officially been opened.
Each essay in this series, which will run monthly, is accompanied by an original artwork of the featured friend of Ignatius.
Venerable Mary Ward
Mary Ward dressed in disguises and snuck into and out of swanky homes and episcopal palaces. She was considered an enormous threat by the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury. She was arrested by the Inquisition under suspicion of heresy; from prison she wrote to her followers in invisible ink. Her religious community was disparaged throughout Europe, derisively called the “galloping girls,” and despised by many Catholics, all while secretly reconciling Englishmen to the Catholic faith through their work as undercover missionaries. After her order was suppressed by the pope, her name was literally cut out of the history books. Mary Ward was a menace.
And now she’s been declared venerable. More than that: Pope Pius XII described her as, “that incomparable woman whom England in her darkest and most blood-stained hour gave to the church” (“Half Women Are Not for These Times,” Christine E. Burke). She was a woman whom all the world thought faithless and defiant — but God was working.
Mary Ward (England, 1585-1645) was profoundly shaped by her maternal grandmother Ursula Wright who had spent 14 years imprisoned for her faith; it was Ursula who passed on to Mary the stubbornness without which one cannot cling so steadfastly to the faith in the face of such opposition. Both her education in the faith and her formation as a strong and determined woman would serve Mary well in years to come.
Convinced that she had a religious vocation, Mary turned down three separate offers of marriage (including one from a man who went on to become a Jesuit priest and died in prison for his faith). But though Mary joined an enclosed Poor Clare community in Flanders, she longed to do something for her country, so plagued by violent persecutions of the faithful. Having left the Poor Clares, Mary set to founding a new Poor Clare community that could be a home for English women who had fled to the continent in order to practice their faith freely.
Mary collected a following but soon realized that this wasn’t her vocation either. She honored the value of a cloistered life, but she wanted to serve the church in a more active way, as so many men’s communities did. So — despite the judgment of those who derided her as flakey and indecisive — she left this community as well. “Runaway nun,” they called her, and “false prophetess.” But faithfulness mattered more to Mary than even her reputation and she held firm to her resolution to leave the Poor Clare community she had founded and search instead for the way God was truly calling her to serve the church.
After a time of discernment at home in England, Mary became convinced that God was calling her to found a religious community based on the constitutions of the Society of Jesus. When she and her companions returned to Flanders to begin this community life, they opened a Catholic school for English girls — the first of many such schools built in Flanders, France, Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary.
Meanwhile, Mary (and other members of her company) returned to serve the underground church in England just as many courageous Jesuit priests were. But where the priests were constantly on the run in an England that held any single man in suspicion, Mary’s “Jesuitesses” (as the women were called by their opponents) were able to insinuate themselves into communities that had heard wild rumors about them; since they weren’t the brazen heretics and profligate spendthrifts they were reputed to be, nobody suspected them, and they were able to bring many back to the Catholic faith. They prepared people until they were finally ready to speak to a priest, then brought priests to those seeking to be reconciled. When the archbishop of Canterbury lamented that the disguised Mary Ward had done more harm to the Anglican cause than six Jesuits, she responded by using a diamond to carve her signature on a windowpane in his house (“Walking in Grandmothers’ Footsteps: Mary Ward and the Medieval Spiritual and Intellectual Heritage”).
To our minds, these all seem like acts of tremendous heroism, but many of Mary’s contemporaries were horrified. One priest wrote to Rome in outrage, “These galloping girls do not stay enclosed behind walls, in religious garb, but move around to different place. They have set the conversion of England as their goal and work for it like priests. These ‘Jesuitesses’ dare to speak on religious topics, even in the presence of men. Until now it has never been known for women to undertake apostolic work. They are not capable of it” (“Half Women Are Not for These Times,” Christine E. Burke).
Despite the tremendous amount of good that the sisters were doing both in England and abroad, the overwhelming response of priests and bishops was negative. Because while Mary and her companions hoped to found an active women’s religious order, in the early 17th century such a thing was unheard of. St. Angela Merici had founded the world’s first active women’s religious community in the 16th century, but the Reformation had prompted the church to clamp down on many things, and after the Council of Trent all women’s communities were required to be cloistered. Still, Mary Ward knew that she and her sisters were called to something else: to wear lay clothes, elect their own leadership that would be directly subject to the pope (not individual bishops) and live among the people. She insisted on being faithful to this call, whatever others thought.
Inspired by St. Ignatius, she followed in his footsteps — so much so that many called her community the Jesuitesses. But she followed also in the footsteps of the strong women who had gone before her, insisting that women had much to offer the church.
She walked from Flanders to Rome twice to request permission for her sisters to live this way; a third time she made the voyage as a prisoner of the Inquisition, taken to Rome to be incarcerated as a heretic despite her bone-deep (and costly) commitment to the Catholic Church. Each time she insisted on her faithfulness to the holy Catholic Church, citing holy women who had gone before and lived similar lives of service. Mary was utterly convinced that God had called her to found and lead this community, with exactly the structure it had, and she would not be moved. Still, she told Rome again and again that she would submit. Her life reads like a masterclass in holy obedience: firm and constant requests for a just decision, but never defiance.
Mary refused to cave, not because of her own personal feelings on the governance of women’s religious orders but because she was convicted that this was God’s will. Inspired by St. Ignatius, she followed in his footsteps — so much so that many called her community the Jesuitesses. But she followed also in the footsteps of the strong women who had gone before her, insisting that women had much to offer the church. “There is no such difference between men and women that women may not do great things,” she insisted, “and I hope in God it will be seen, that women in time to come will do much.”
It would take some time before that would be evident to many in the church hierarchy. In 1631, Pope Urban VIII suppressed Ward’s community in no uncertain terms, saying, “We totally and completely suppress and extinguish them, subject them to perpetual abolition and remove them entirely from the Holy Church of God. We destroy and annul them, and we wish and command all the Christian faithful to regard and repute them as suppressed, extinct, rooted out, destroyed and abolished” (“Half Women Are Not for These Times,” Christine E. Burke). With this, most of Mary’s foundations were disbanded, their members scattered.
As she grieved the loss of her life’s work and wrestled with guilt over the fates of the women who had so trusted her and had now been thrown back into a world that had no place for them, she was imprisoned in Munich for several months. When she was subsequently brought to Rome to be tried for heresy, Mary pleaded with Pope Urban VIII to understand her intention to serve in the heart of the church: “Holy Father, I neither am nor ever have been a heretic.” Using the royal we, the pope comforted Mary by saying, “We believe it, we believe it.” Still, there was as yet no room in the church for an order such as the one Mary imagined. She was never brought to trial but was required to stay in Rome indefinitely and forbidden to live in community.
Mary Ward lived in a time of schism and sects. It would have been beyond easy for her to rebel against Rome’s restrictions by joining a different church (or founding her own). It would have been easy to swing to the other extreme as well, ignoring the clear call the Lord had put on her heart in order to avoid conflict. Instead, Mary lived in obedience while unstintingly following Jesus. Arrested under suspicion of heresy, she had no choice but to write to her companions in invisible ink as she sought her freedom. But she never rejected the church’s authority, even once she was freed after seven years of near house arrest. No, Mary returned to England where she continued to serve the church until her death.
Despite Mary Ward’s failure in life to establish her order, the women who followed her persevered. A hundred years after Mary’s death, a bull was issued that insisted that she not be recognized as the foundress of the community, but did approve it as a religious order. It wasn’t until 1909 that Mary Ward’s status as foundress was finally recognized by Rome. Today, her vision is lived out by thousands of sisters in the two religious orders that trace their founding to her: the Congregation of Jesus and the Sisters of Loreto. Over the centuries, these women have changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of students in the hundreds of schools they run, all because Venerable Mary Ward insisted on following God’s call, whatever the cost.
