Mary Ward's English Institute: The Apostolate as Self-Affirmation?

International audienceMary Ward (1585-1645) is known as the foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an Order of women which, in its various forms, continues to educate girls around the world today. During the first decades of the seventeenth-century, her foundation maintained clandestine branches on English soil and opened eleven colleges on the Continent. There, it trained its own members and undertook the education of externs and boarders, following the model of the Society of Jesus. The Institute's vocation was not only to maintain the faith where it was already present but also to propagate it. To some modern historians, Mary Ward's initiative deliberately set out to lay tradition to rest and begin a new era for the women in the Church. Yet, this study contends that the English Ladies' active vocation inscribed itself within a heritage of long-established forms of female religious life. When they denied themselves the perfect life of the cloister, these missionaries embraced the apostolate, not as a gesture of self-empowerment but as one of self-abnegation in the service of the Church