Sr Elizabeth Prout CP declared Venerable by Alan Frost

Sr Elizabeth Prout, declared Venerable

Last month Oremus featured the life of the Passionist priest, the Venerable Ignatius Spencer. Now we turn to another recently declared Passionist-inspired Venerable, Sr Elizabeth Prout.

Alan Frost

In January this year, Pope Francis declared accepted by Rome straightaway, but after Venerable the English nun Sr Elizabeth good reports of the selfess charitable Prout, a step towards canonisation begun work of teaching, shelter and providing in 1994, when Archbishop Derek Warlock for the poor, by 1852 they were known as of Liverpool offciated at the church of St ‘The Catholic Sisters of the Holy Family’. Anne in Sutton, her place of burial. This They outgrew their base in Cheetham established her Cause, 130 years after Hill and were given property, including her death. In July 2008 his successor, a school, in the Levenshulme district of Patrick Kelly, came to the same church to Manchester. Shortly before this, ‘Mother complete the work of the promoters and Mary Joseph’, as she became, had set up a have the documentation sent to Rome via school in Ancoats, for the poor in an Irish the Nunciature for examination. quarter near the city centre. For all their Elizabeth was born in Shrewsbury on 2 September 1820 and brought up as an Anglican, leaving her birthplace when her father, a skilled cooper, was made redundant. Another brewery employed 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. him, in the town of Stone, and it was to The selfess devotion she and the Sisters the Crown Inn there that Blessed Dominic showed led to her being asked numerous Barberi, having recently arrived in England times to set up schools and convents as a missionary priest, came to give elsewhere. One of the accepted ventures, talks on the Catholic Faith. The 21-year- where she herself resettled, was the St old Elizabeth was most impressed; she Anne’s School in the Sutton area of the lived just two miles from his Aston Hall glass-making town of St Helen’s. Setbacks residence. With a young Passionist priest, included her own failing health, but she Fr Gaudentius Rossi, he would have taught was cheered by her parents becoming and instructed Elizabeth at the same time Catholics and by news from Rome in 1863 as he was giving instruction to St John that the Rule for her new Order had fnally Henry Newman. Despite her parents’ been accepted. Relieved, and encouraging disapproval, she was converted to the her Sisters to the last, she died the following Catholic faith and wished to become a year at Sutton, to the sound of the Angelus religious. Fr Rossi advised her of a teaching post in Manchester, which she accepted, and so she moved to the city that was the engine-room of the Industrial Revolution in September 1849. Mother Mary Joseph in stained © Matthewafallen bell on 11 January, with Fr Spencer at her bedside administering the Last Rites. In her lifetime she established her Order steadily in the north-west of England through its educational foundations. Mother

However, the social conditions she glass at her Shrine Mary Joseph was also very keen on encountered were much worse than providing homes and a safe base for the anything she had ever experienced. Her accommodation factory girls taught by the Sisters, who helped with making in a house next to St. Chad’s Church in Cheetham Hill and repairing clothes for the poor. The Order has continued to (now home to Manchester’s Oratorians) was in a quite grow and her life-long close association with the Passionists respectable area. Where she would teach in Ancoats, only was recognised in the bestowal upon it, shortly after she died, a mile away, was not; to get there she would pass through of the title ‘Sisters of the Cross and Passion of Our Lord Jesus the most notorious slum area of the city. Shocked as she Christ’. These Sisters would go on to set up a convent and must have been, she rose to the challenge and helped by Fr school (1899-1967) beside what is now the Shrine Church Ignatius Spencer, also a convert, Elizabeth set up a religious of St Mary in Warrington, and the link is revived as these community on the lines of the Passionist Order. Her followers buildings have recently been obtained again by the Priory and helpers wore an identifying badge, Jesu XPI Passio, Church, with the teaching of the Faith to children taking which adorned the frst religious habits to be worn publicly place there once more. Indeed, the work of the Order, this in England since the Reformation. The community was not wonderful nun’s legacy, goes on today across the world.