Hardback: Mary Ward, foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was born in Yorkshire in 1585, twenty-nine years after the death of St Ignatius Loyola. Her background is the England of divided loyalties, of civil wars, of faith made steadfast by trial and persecution. To seek and to know God's will was the touchstone of her life.
Step by step, she discovered her vocation taking shape along the lines envisaged by St Ignatius. For her Institute, as for his Order, there was to be no enclosure: the structures were to work for a new liberty for the service of Christ. Mission was to be the purpose.
She was in advance of her time and was imprisoned by the Inquisition and condemned by the Church as a heretic and rebel. She allowed her work to be destroyed like the grain of wheat dying for a future growth.
It is to Mary Ward that women religious owe their freedom to work outside their cloister walls as teachers, nurses, missionaries, and any other of the multifarious vocations open to women today.
Worldwide, Mary Ward's daughters witness to this, from Africa to Siberia, from North America to Korea. She was a pioneer in her concern for the education of girls - a new concept in her time. Nor did she differentiate between rich and poor, a watershed in the history of education. She could not have accomplished all this except out of a deep spirituality and complete trust in God. The popes of the twentieth century have recognised her as one of the pioneers of the Church. Pius XII referred to her as "that incomparable woman whom England, in her darkest and most bloodstained hour, gave to the Church."
In the 1870s, Burns & Oates published a Life of Mary Ward in two volumes. Since then, no full biography has been attempted in the English language, while a great deal of new material concerning her has been brought to light, and interest in her has grown steadily.
At a time when the IBVM is, like many religious orders struggling to redefine its purpose in the modern world and at a time when Mary Ward may herself be canonised by the present Pope, this book is particularly relevant.
The work of the order is also controversial and often criticised - indirectly in the novels of Antonia White and the writings of former pupils such as Marina Warner.
Mary Ward: Pilgrim and Mystic is Sr Margaret Mary's most notable work. It was begun in 1975 and took 23 years to complete. Published in 1998, it was an instant best seller and introduced the general public to Mary Ward.
About the author: Sister Margaret Mary Littlehales was a much-loved nun, author and teacher. She was born into a bilingual (English and French) family on 5 April 1907. Sister Margaret Mary became a nun in 1926 aged 19 when George V was on the throne, Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister and the country was going through the trauma of the General Strike. She served an astonishing 83 years as a member of the Congregation of Jesus (CJ) and lived out her final years in St Joseph's, a house belonging to York's Bar Convent where she lived to see the new extension built.
She went on to become a gifted English Literature teacher, teaching hundreds of children in many CJ schools, including 26 years at the Bar Convent between 1954 and 1980, until her retirement in 1999. She also taught Latin and Greek and in later years, German. Alongside her teaching, Sister Margaret Mary assisted in the restoration of the Bar Convent, arranging for the convents archives to be professionally catalogued. It was her writing on Mary Ward - the North Yorkshire woman who in 1609 founded the order of nuns that live at the Bar Convent - which gave her most pleasure.
Writing as Adrienne Gascoigne, she has had a number of poems published, mainly in the Spectator.
One of her sisters and a cousin, Sisters Scholastica and Magdelen, joined her as members of the Mary Ward Institute. In 1999 at the age of 92, Sister Margaret Mary retired from St Joseph’s and in September 2006, she celebrated the 80th anniversary of taking her religious vows. She celebrated her 100th birthday in April 2007 with a quiet Mass and received over 100 cards from family and friends as well as a personal card from The Queen.
Sr Margaret Mary died peacefully in May 2009 aged 102.
(Excerpt taken from The York Press, 9 May 2009)
A Note on the Name of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary: The official title of the Institute as recognised by the Church is Institutum Beatae Mariae Virginis. Except in England, the members write after their names IBMV. As the English rendering contracts to IBVM, the English members use that form, which is how they are referred to by most people in England. On the Continent, they are often known by the name given to the first Sisters: in Belgium and the Netherlands, Les Dames Anglaises; in Italy, Le Dame Inglese or Gentildonne Inglese; in Germany, they are widely known as Die Englische Fräulein.
