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Mary Ward was an English Catholic who refused to conform to the religious and gender expectations of early modern England. Refusing to conform to the state religion of the Church of England, she founded a religious institute for women, the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Congregation of Jesus, now also known as the Sisters of Loreto, which still exists today. Branches of Ward’s order currently sponsor more than 200 schools worldwide.
Ward came from a famously Catholic family; two of her uncles were executed for their involvement in the 1605 Gunpower Plot, and her father was questioned regarding it. Ward kept detailed records of her life, and two of her followers composed an account of her life after she died. A more recent biography and five-volume German publication of documents related to her life and religious mission solidify her as an important figure in the religious and social strife of the period.
Christened as Joan Ward, Mary Ward was an English Catholic from Yorkshire whose family experienced significant persecution in the last decades of the 16th century. Her family’s home was burned down when she was about 10 years old in an anti-Catholic riot. Like many English people who were unwilling to become Protestants and adhere to the law that required they attend the Church of England, Ward left England for Europe.
Upon leaving England in 1606, she joined the order the Poor Clares, a Franciscan order of nuns, in Flanders, but left it the next year to establish another house of Poor Clares for Englishwomen only, called the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Congregation of Jesus, which still exists today. Scholar Alexanra Verini summarizes Ward’s unique approach:
Ward’s
The Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary was non-monastic and non-cloistered. The members of the order did not wear habits, instead dressing in modest ordinary clothes. Like the male Jesuits, Ward’s new order served communities through teaching and pastoral care. In fact, Ward closely modeled the oaths for her new order on those of the Jesuits.
Yet male religious institutions, especially the Jesuits, rejected the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary even though it had the approval of Pope Paul V because it clashed with their beliefs on the role of women within society and the family. Ward was arrested multiple times and accused of heresy, spending a year in prison in Munich in 1631.
During the early modern period, girls had limited options for formal education in Protestant countries like England. In 1609, Ward opened the first free public school for English girls and local French Catholic girls in Saint-Omer, France. Unlike traditional convent schools, Ward’s schools followed a more secular, humanist tradition, offering girls a similar program of study to what boys received in grammar schools. She went on to found several other schools in Italy and Germany. Due to the severe anti-Catholic sentiment in her home country, none of Ward’s schools were opened in England until 1639. Mary Ward died in 1645 at one of her schools in Yorkshire during a siege that was part of the English Civil Wars.
Ward left behind extensive writings pertaining to her life and Institute. These writings cover her life as a young girl in England, her early religious life in France as a member of the more traditional Poor Clares, and her establishing of her new non-cloistered order. A set of 50 paintings of Ward’s life, completed by different artists in the second half of the 17th century, also survive in Augsburg, Germany. The religious order of women she founded has two branches today, one known as The Congregation of Jesus and the other as The Institute of Jesus, with about 4000 members. The order she founded was formally recognized by the Catholic Church in 1877. In 2009, she was declared Venerable by Pope Benedict XI, which is a formal recognition of her spiritual heroism and one step on the path to official sainthood.