English gentlewoman and recusant Catholic, founder of schools for women based on the Jesuit model despite strenuous opposition from within the Catholic Church
Born in Yorkshire in 1585, Mary Ward left England, as did many Catholic Englishwomen of her time, seeking the religious life; she entered a Poor Clare convent in the Spanish Netherlands in 1606. Between 1609 and 1610, she founded a religious institute and school for women and girls at St. Omer based on Jesuit traditions; the curriculum of the English Ladies included preparation for religious or secular life through study in reading, writing, religion, Latin, and the acting of plays to improve speaking. Like the Jesuits, Mary Ward envisioned an unenclosed order that combined the contemplative life with active service and that was ruled not by local church authorities but that was directly overseen by the pope. The Englishwomen of the institute also took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. On one occasion, a Jesuit minister commented that “fervour will decay; and when all is done, they are but women!” Mary Ward, an outspoken advocate of women’s education, responded that “there is no such difference between men and women that women may not do great things. . . ,” and she insisted that “women in time will do much.”
Mary Ward constantly found her mission in financial hardship because, without papal approval, her novices had difficulty providing their dowries for the institute. There was also stringent opposition to her undertaking from adversaries who were resistant to nonenclosure for women and who feared the institute’s association with the Jesuits. Nevertheless, she established schools in Flanders, Germany, Italy,
Austria, and Hungary. However, in 1631, Pope Urban VIII signed a Bull of Suppression, which effectively ended Mary Ward’s work. In a letter from Cardinal San’Onofrio, Pope Urban VIII’s brother, she was declared “a heretic, schismatic, and rebel to the Holy Church” and imprisoned at a Poor Clare convent in Munich for over two months (Little-hales 1998, 204). Finally exonerated, Mary Ward’s institute never received papal approval in her lifetime, although she devoted the rest of her life to safeguarding it in Rome and England for her companions to rebuild in subsequent years.
Marlo Belschner
See also Convents; Religious Reform and Women.
Bibliography
Fraser, Antonia. “Mary Ward:A 17th Century Reformer.” History Today 31, no. 5 (1981): 14-18. Available at: Http://www. historytoday. com.
Littlehales, Margaret Mary. Mary Ward: Pilgrim and Mystic, 1585-1645. Kent: Burns and Oates, 1998.
McClory, Robert. Faithful Dissenters: Stories of Men and Women Who Loved and Changed the Church. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000.
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