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‘Wandering Nuns’*: The Return of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the South of England, 1862–1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2015
Extract
‘Woods, M. Joseph died ye 20 April 1822, the last of ye Ladies of ye Establishment’
So ends the register of the convent founded in Hammersmith in 1669, and with the death of Sister Joseph the Institute of Mary became extinct in the south of England. But in distant Belfast the story of its revival was already taking shape. On 1st April 1812 a little girl, Mary Petronilla, was born there to a Protestant Doctor Barratt and his wife. We know nothing of her childhood, but it is thought that as a young woman she taught singing in a Loreto convent. About the year 1835 she was received into the Catholic Church, and so embarked upon a career that was to have far-reaching effects. The presence of a Roman Catholic daughter may have been embarrassing to the doctor’s household, or perhaps it was just the desire to learn German and to see the world that prompted Mary Barratt to follow the advice of the Loreto Sisters and to accept a teaching post advertised in Augsburg. There she not only learned German in return for giving English lessons, but she observed religious life as lived in the oldest house of the Institute. Strict as the régime was (the nuns rose at 4.30 am. all the year round) she fell in love with it and asked to be received into the novitiate. On 10th September 1844 she was clothed in the habit and given the name Sister Petronilla, though this was later changed to Sister Ignatius.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1973
Footnotes
*
This epithet, used in a pejorative sense, was applied to the early companions of Mary Ward because they would not accept religious enclosure. The present article describes the purposeful mobility of members of the same Institute.
References
Notes
1 Sometimes spelled ‘Barrett’.
2 BCA, D15.1.(vii).
3 ‘Some daughters of Mary Ward’ by Sr. Philip Hardman, I.B.V.M. (unpublished) p. 18. BCA G21.
4 The words are those of Dr. James Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, quoted in William Hutch’s ‘Mrs. Ball, a Biography, 1879.
5 BCA, D15.1.(v).
6 BCA, D 15.1.(xiii). Copy of a letter to Dr. Creevy, written about Aug. 3rd, 1861.
7 BCA, D.15.1.(ii), p. 5.
8 BCA, E107. Typescript copy of the I.B.V.M. Constitutions of 1707.
9 BCA, 3C3. (Papal rescript putting the community under the Vicar Apolostic). For the Constitutions drawn up by Abbé Nicholas Gilbert, see BCA, Vol. 6.
10 BCA, J18. The document is printed in ‘The Rules and Constitutions of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ pub. by Richard Coyne, Dublin, 1832, pp. 38–40.
11 Daniel Murray 1768–1852, Archbishop of Dublin 1823–1852. The decree is in the Dublin Diocesan Archives: Murray Papers, AB3/31/5(40). Copy in BCA, E81.
12 BCA, D 15.1.(iii).
13 Margaret Gibbons: ‘Loreto, Navan: one hundred years of Catholic progress 1833–1933’ (n. pl., n.publ., 1933).
14 Hutch, W. ‘Mrs. Ball, a Biography’, 1879, p. 462.Google Scholar
15 Paul Cullen, 1803–1878. Archbishop of Armagh 1849–1852: Archbishop of Dublin 1852–1878: created cardinal in 1866. The letter declaring his intention is in BCA, D15.1(x).
16 BCA, D15.1.(xii). This document is a very rough draft of a letter from Mother Ignatius, probably to Archbishop Cullen.
17 BCA, D15.1.(xiv).
18 BCA, D 15.1.(xvi). Letter from Bishop Clifford.
19 BCA, D15.2.(iv). The probable date is 1907.
20 James Duck (Basil) O.S.B. 1813–1863, Monk of Downside Abbey.
21 Catholic Directory 1861. Despite the proliferation of convents in the 19th. century, there were only nine in the Clifton Diocese in 1861; of these only three offered education for middle or upper class girls.
22 William Clifford, 1823–1893. For further details and an excellent reproduction of a portrait by Podesti, see Hugh, Clifford’s ‘The House of Clifford’ pub. Phillimore, 1987, pp. 183 Google Scholar et seq.
23 BCA, D15.1.(xxi).
24 Hugh, Clifford: ‘The House of Clifford’, p. 183 Google Scholar. P. Hughes: ‘The see was all but seemingly vowed to bankruptcy in perpetuity’. (English Catholics, ed. by G. R. Beck 1950, p. 200).
25 BCA. In Box L22 there are some faded but still informative photographs.
26 BCA, D 15.1.(xvii).
27 BCA, G15.
28 BCA, D15.1.(ix).
29 Ibidem.
30 See pamphlet ‘Like a grain of mustard seed’, p. 29. Copy in BCA, D15.1.(ix).
31 Clifton Diocesan Archives, Bishop Clifford’s Letters, Vol. 3, pps. 354 and 508. Copy in BCA, D15.1.(xxiv) and (xxv).
32 BCA, D15.1.(ix).
33 Reproduced in ‘Gloucester in old photographs from the Welwin Collection’ compiled by J. Voyce 1989, p. 130.
34 A disappointing, rather lifeless portrait of her hangs in the Bar Convent Museum, York.
35 A relevant letter is quoted in Drane’s, F. R. ‘Life of Mother Margaret Hallahan’ (1929), pp. 206–209.Google Scholar
36 BCA, D15.2.(ii) includes the three letters written by Fr. Wilberforce to Mother Joseph.
37 BCA, D15.1.(ix), p. 2.
38 BCA, Box L22: Gloucester.
39 This portrait hangs in the Bar Convent Museum, York.
40 Bede Jarrett: The English Dominicans, B.O. and W., 1921, p. 204.
41 Ibidem, p. 205. D. Evison: Catholic Churches of London (Academic Books), 1998, pp. 73–74. P. Howell & I. Sutton: The Faber Guide to Victorian Churches, Faber & Faber, 1989, p. 81.
42 BCA, D15.2.(vi), p. 2.
43 BCA, D 15.1.(xxvi).
44 The tortuous history of the many changes of location have to be traced through all the documents in the file, BCA, D15.2.
45 BCA, D15.2.(vi).
46 The altar and the windows (by N. Westlake) are now in the chapel of 47 Fitzjohn’s Avenue, Hampstead.
47 BCA, D15.2.(iv).
48 BCA, D15.2.(vi), p. 2.
49 BCA, D15.2.(v), p. 1.
50 The facts about Catherine Chambers’s life as an Anglican nun are taken from T. J. Williams’s Priscilla Lydia Sellon, S.P.C.K. 1965.
51 BCA, G12.1.
52 Pope Benedict XIV denied Mary Ward the title of foundress in his Bull Quamvis Justo 1749, on the grounds that her Institute had been suppressed ‘for ever’ by Urban VIII’s Bull Pastoralis Romani Pontificis of 1631.
53 Her portrait hangs in the Bar Convent Museum, York.
54 The story of the Ascot foundation can be traced, inter alia, in the papers BCA, D15.2.(i)–(vii) and is told in Roy Wake’s St. Mary’s School Ascot and its antecedents. (Haggerston Press), 1994.
55 BCA, D15.2.(vi), p. 4.