Sisters of the Cross Alan Frost looks at the remarkable life of the Venerable Elizabeth Prout CP

In 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 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 ultimately approval from Rome. The very timing of the beginning of her work was as sensitive as it was relevant. On the political front there were the activities of the Chartists agitating the masses, while in 1850 the formal restoration of a structured Catholic Church caused great protest from protestant groups.

Elizabeth herself, as she gradually acquired helpers in promoting the Faith in the mills and factories (girls she taught to make and repair clothes and to read and write), became a target of Evangelical anti-Catholic preachers. Nonetheless she persevered and was able to open her first convent, by St Chad’s, in August 1851, less than two years after leaving Stone.

Her first companions worked as seamstresses in a mill while she was teaching in Ancoats. It was poorly paid work, so the convent began in considerable poverty, and had the difficult distinction of needing to be self-financing, so its members had to be wage-earners. On the other hand, Elizabeth had succeeded in obtaining a substantial education grant after a report by a schools’ inspector, and her dedication to and example set in Catholic teaching gained the support of the Bishop.

In November 1852, Fr Rossi came to the convent to present the seven members of the community with black habits and the name ‘The Catholic Sisters of the Holy Family’. Her followers and helpers wore an identifying badge or Sign, Jesu XPI Passio, which adorned the first religious habits to be worn publicly in England since the Reformation. To this, later, they added the letters JMJ. Before long, they outgrew their base in Cheetham Hill and were given property, including a school, in the Levenshulme district of Manchester. Shortly before this, Mother Mary Joseph, as Elizabeth became, had set up a school for the poor in an Irish quarter of Ancoats, near the city centre, which she named after St Joseph. For all their poverty, the children bedecked in their Sunday best, presented a spectacle that drew the crowds onto the streets in the early days of what became the traditional Manchester Whit Walks.

The selfless devotion Elizabeth and the Sisters showed led to her being asked numerous times to set up schools and convents elsewhere. Realistically they could only take on a few of these, though at one of them, Mother Mary Joseph herself re-settled. This was the St Anne’s School in Sutton. There were to be setbacks to contend with, including her own failing health, but she was cheered by her parents becoming Catholics late in life, and by news from Rome in 1863 that the Rule for her new Order had finally been accepted. News, in fact, brought back personally by Fr Spencer. Relieved, and assuring her Sisters at the last, Elizabeth died the following year on January 11, at Sutton, to the sound of the Angelus bell. Fr Spencer was at her bedside to give her the Last Rites.

In her lifetime she established the name of her Order steadily in the northwest of England through its educational foundations. Mother Mary Joseph was also very keen on providing homes and a safe base for the factory girls taught by the Sisters, who helped with making and repairing clothes for the poor. The community she founded continued to grow and her life-long close association with the Passionists was recognised in the bestowing upon the Order, shortly after she died, the title Sisters of the Cross and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. These Sisters would continue to set up convents and schools, notably (from 1899-1967) beside what is now the Shrine Church of St Mary in Warrington, run by the FSSP. This link has remarkably been revived, as these buildings have recently been acquired by the Priory Church and the teaching of the true Catholic Faith to children is taking place there again. Indeed, the work of the Order, this wonderful nun’s legacy, goes on today across the world. Her life is told in the book With Christ in His Passion (Gracewing) by the Chief Promoter of her cause for some thirty years, Sr Dominic Savio Hamer CP.

With Christ in His Passion is available from the LMS online shop £7.05 (incl. p&p). For further reading: Elizabeth Prout 1820 - 1864: A Religious Life for Industrial England by Edna Hamer, £17.85 (incl. p&p).