A high ideal

Mary O’Regan remembers the Little Company of Mary and its founder, Mary Potter

Mary Potter, a native Londoner, had an extremely pressing meeting with Pope Leo XIII. She was a 35-year-old nun with cornflower blue eyes and a smile that imparted peace and joy to all who met her. In the Vatican, she presented the smiling Pope with a Constitution for a radical new religious order. Back in England, she had founded The Little Company of Mary which aimed to care for the sick and dying.

She was consumed by a calling to lead a movement of sisters who would tend to those who were close to death and most especially the souls in danger of losing out on Heaven. Mary Potter wanted sisters who wanted their hearts re-made in the mould of the Virgin Mary's Maternal Heart and who would serve the dying with the same tender loving care as Mary served Christ on the Cross.

A high ideal to care for every single dying person as the Queen of Heaven did for her Son, but Mary never flagged.

That day in 1882, Pope Leo XIII welcomed Mary with open arms, dipped his quill in ink, signed her decree, and gave papal blessing to her burgeoning community of sisters. The Pope told Mary: "The doors of Rome are always open to you," and there and then he asked her to stay in Rome and found the Mother House of her order so that the sick and dying of Rome - through Mary Potter's influence - could know something of the same loving tender care that Our Lady gave Our Lord.

Mary Potter never returned to England. She suffered from cancer and in caring for the dying poor she contracted typhoid. She died in 1913.

To found the first convent, Mary had actually run away from home. She was in her twenties when, against the wishes of her mother, she took a train to Nottingham where the bishop gave her and four other women his blessing to start their work as The Little Company of Mary Sisters in an abandoned stocking factory. It was in an area of great poverty. The sisters set up a soup kitchen and worked tirelessly for the destitute.

This had not been the life her mother had wanted for her.  Mary was born in Bermondsey, London, in 1847. Her father, an inept businessman, absconded to Australia, and was never heard from again. Mary’s mother hated the idea that her daughter should become a nun and work with the poor.

But curiously, her mother had placed a Miraculous Medal on Mary when she was born, and she gave her child the name Mary expressly in honour of the Mother of Christ. Mary was sickly, born with a congenital heart defect and a lung ailment, and her mother may have given her the medal and the name Mary to try to save her life, but perhaps there was more to it – Mary discovered much later in life that her mother had promised her to the Lord as His bride. Mary's mother was a convert to the Catholic Faith, which wasn't the popular, social-climbing club to be in.

Before her calling, Mary had attracted a young chap who proposed marriage. He had reservations though - he thought Mary was too frivolous and shallow, so he gave her Louis de Montfort's  Total Consecration to Jesus Christ Through Mary, and he could scarcely have imagined that this was to ignite the furnace of charity that made Mary want to give up everything for the sick and dying. She broke off their engagement.

Mary wanted a pale blue veil for The Little Company of Mary, in honour of the Mother who had stood, while her Child's Blood wet the wood upon which He was nailed. Mary saw the poor die on basic wooden planks, but the poor had Mary, as Jesus had Our Lady. As Our Lady's dowry is England, Mary Potter is an asset from that same special inheritance. It's not a bequest of pounds and pence, rather it's one that keeps on giving in souls saved; as we pray in every single Hail Mary that she who is without sin pray for us at the hour of our death, she sends people in her name, who are the living embodiment of the dowry, who help those dying to be at peace, and to be without the malady of sin as they prepare to meet her Son.  Mary Potter was proclaimedVenerable in 1988 by Pope John Paul II.