ENGLISH SAINT - FIRST IN 800 YEARS

Shrewsbury-born nun is on course to become Britain’s first female non-martyr saint in 800 years after the Vatican ruled she lived a life of ‘heroic virtue’.

MOTHER ELIZABETH PROUT labored in the slums of Victorian Manchester and towns of North West England until her death at 43 from tuberculosis.

The so-called “Mother Teresa of Manchester” opened a chain of schools for poor children and homes for destitute women across the industrialized region, and was ahead of her time in teaching women crucial skills to earn their own livings.

 Her canonization could mean she will become the first English female since Pope St Paul VI in 1970 included Ss Margaret Clitheroe, Anne Line and Margaret Ward among 40 canonized martyrs of Englandand Wales. She would be the first non-martyr English female saint since St Margaret of Wessex, an 11th century Anglo-Saxon princess who became Queen of Scotland after the Norman invasion of William the Conqueror, and who was canonized in 1250.

 Swift progress would also mean that, after a break of nearly half a century, Englandwould have another saint in a short space of time, given that Pope Francis declared Cardinal John Henry Newman a saint only in October.

The breakthrough in the cause was revealed by Sister Dominic Savio Hamer, her biographer and a member of the Passionist Sisters, the order founded by Mother Elizabeth in 1854. Writing in the Christmas edition of the Shrewsbury Catholic Voice, she said: ““We can imitate Elizabeth Prout in many ways and pray to her with confidence.”

“She was such a practical person – so entirely God-centred, so forgetful of self, so generous in giving herself to others, so willing to suffer in union with Our Lord’s Passion, always so that God’s will might be done.” 

Elizabeth was born into an Anglican family in Shrewsbury in 1820 and has been described as “refined, intelligent and gently nurtured”.  She was received into the Catholic faith in her early 20s by Bl Dominic Barberi, the Italian missionary who would later receive St John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church.

At the age of 28 she became a nun and a few years later was given a teaching post in some of the poorest areas of industrial Manchester, working largely among Irish migrants and factory workers.

At the time, poverty in Manchesterwas dire with Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, in 1844 describing parts of the city as “this hell upon earth”.

Four years later one observer described the Angel Meadow district as “the lowest,most filthy, most unhealthy and most wicked locality in Manchester… the home of prostitutes, their bullies, thieves, codgers, vagrants, tramps, and in the very worst sties of filth and darkness… the low Irish”.

It was in such a social context that Mother Elizabeth developed a reputation for her tireless efforts in teaching, sheltering, feeding and nursing the needy and opening an archipelago of schools and hostels across the most poverty-stricken parts of the region.

After other women joined her, she founded a religious community, but many people, including Catholics, criticized the new institute for its so-called “revolutionary ideas” – namely that of obliging nuns to earn their own wages to support themselves and by showing other women how to do the same.

But the Vatican approved the order in 1863 and named the deeply practical Elizabethas the first Superior General.  

She can certainly be an intercessor to so many of the world's poor who are suffering under horrendous conditions- a sin in the day and age of such wealth.