FEATURE
Sisters of the Cross Alan Frost looks at the remarkable life of the Venerable Elizabeth Prout CP
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n December 1994, the Archbishop of Liverpool, Derek Warlock, wnet to a church in St Helen’s, Lancashire, to officiate at the formal beginning of the Cause for the Canonisation of Sr Elizabeth Prout, some 130 years after her death. In July 2008, his successor, Patrick Kelly, went to the same church, St Anne’s, in the district of Sutton, where her body lies, to formally complete the process in England before all the documentation was despatched to Rome. Though she spent much of her life and started her mission among the (mostly Irish) poor of Manchester, Elizabeth was actually born in Shrewsbury on September 2, 1820 and brought up an Anglican. She left her birthplace when her father, a skilled cooper, was made redundant. Another brewery employed him, but in the Staffordshire town of Stone. It was to the Crown Inn in this town that one Bl Dominic Barberi, having recently arrived in England as a missionary priest of the Passionist Order, came to give talks on the Catholic Faith. The 21-year-old Elizabeth, who lived just two miles from his Aston Hall residence, was most impressed. With another Passionist priest, Fr Gaudentius Rossi, he would have taught and instructed Elizabeth at the same time as he was giving instruction to, and bringing into the Catholic Church, the mighty figure of John Henry Newman. He was also in regular contact with another outstanding daughter of the Church, Mother Margaret Hallahan, who re-established the Dominican Sisters in England. Indeed, the Convent she founded in Stone is the Motherhouse of the Order today, and in its grounds is the chapel of St Anne founded by Fr Barberi as a church and schoolhouse. Undoubtedly Elizabeth Prout would have known this chapel well. Despite her parents’ disapproval, she converted to the Catholic faith and wished to become a religious. Fr Rossi advised her of a teaching post in Manchester, which she accepted, and so it was that she moved to the city that
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was the engine-room of the Industrial Revolution, in September 1849. She soon found that the social conditions she encountered were much worse than anything she had ever experienced. Though her accommodation in a house next to St Chad’s Church in Cheetham Hill (now home to Manchester’s Oratorians) was in a quite respectable area, she would be teaching in the district of Ancoats, a far poorer area. To get there she would pass through the most notorious slum area of the city. The children she would teach came from these slum areas.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 book Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life gives a vivid description of the appalling, unsanitary conditions in which these children lived. Yet, shocked as she must have been, Elizabeth rose to the challenge, such was her spiritual strength. She was guided by Passionist principles and helped by another of their priests, Fr Ignatius Spencer. Any new Institute or Order such as the one set up by Elizabeth had to be accepted officially by the Church; it would need a Rule to be formulated and
SUMMER 2021
