 |
|
Mother Mary Joseph (Prout), Foundress of the Sisters of the Cross and Passion Researched by Sister Dominic Savio [Dr E. Hamer] CP Mt St Joseph Convent, Bolton BL3 4HF Elizabeth Prout was born in Shrewsbury on 2 September 1820. Her father, Edward Prout, was a journeyman cooper, working at the Salopian Brewery in Coleham, an industrial suburb on the outer side of the River Severn. Like her mother, Ann (Yates), Elizabeth was baptised into the Church of England. By 1841 the Coleham brewery had closed and Elizabeth and her family were living in New Brewery Yard, Stone, Staffordshire, beside Joule’s Stone Brewery. In 1842 the Passionist, Blessed Dominic Barberi opened a monastery at Aston Hall, less than two miles from Elizabeth’s home and within the next few years she became a Catholic. In 1848, at the suggestion of another Passionist priest, Father Gaudentius Rossi, she entered the convent of the Sisters of the Infant Jesus in Northampton. In January 1849, however, she had to leave because she had contracted tuberculosis in her knee. She returned home to Stone, where her mother nursed her so well that she recovered but when she began to go out to Mass her mother was very angry. Elizabeth realised she would have to leave home. In the meantime, Father Gaudentius had given a mission at St Chad’s in Manchester and knew that the priest there, Father Robert Croskell, was looking for a schoolmistress. Father Gaudentius arranged that Elizabeth should take the post and so about early September 1849 she arrived in Manchester, the frontier town of the industrial revolution, to discover that people were dying on the streets from cholera and that her school was a battered old warehouse with a big hole in the roof in George Leigh Street, Ancoats, in the very heart of the crowded houses of the town centre. Almost immediately she began to found her religious order, at the invitation of Father Gaudentius Rossi and Father Robert Croskell and with the permission of Bishop William Turner and Father Ignatius Spencer CP. Father Gaudentius Rossi’s intention was to provide a Congregation that, like the Passionist Congregation, would be both contemplative and active. The members would have no dowry, for it was intended for those young women who felt called to the full consecrated life of choir observance, rather than to the role of lay sisters, but could not afford the dowry required by the established orders. Hence they would have to support themselves in whatever way they could that was compatible with their religious life. Elizabeth Prout opened her first convent with two companions at 69 Stocks Street, Cheetham Hill on 15 August 1851. She had further convents and schools at Newton Heath near Manchester, Levenshulme, Ashton-under-Lyne and, from 1855, in Parr Hall and Sutton. In all those places her Sisters also visited the homes of the children they taught as well as the sick and the negligent, instructed converts and made vestments. In Ashton they had sewing schools for the unemployed mill girls and later they provided Homes for mill girls, too. Elizabeth Prout, or Mother Mary Joseph as she was known in religion, died in Sutton on 11 January 1864. She was buried in St Anne’s graveyard but in 1973, with the permission of the Home Office, her remains were exhumed and reinterred under the marble floor of the Shrine of Blessed Dominic Barberi in the new Church of St Anne and Blessed Dominic in Sutton. It was there that, on 18 May 1994, His Grace, Archbishop Derek Worlock of Liverpool inaugurated the Process for the ultimate Canonisation of the Servant of God, Elizabeth Prout, Mother Mary Joseph of Jesus, Foundress of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Cross and Passion. # 0001 |
 |
St.Anne and Blessed Dominic Monastery Lane, Sutton St.Helens WA9 3SP Telephone: 01744 811935 |