A giant step to sainthood for ‘Manchester’s Mother Teresa’
A VICTORIAN poverty campaigner and feminist forerunner known as the Mother Teresa of Manchester is set to become the second English saint of modern times.
Elizabeth Prout, who was born in Shrewsbury in 1820, was an activist who opened schools for poor children as well as homes for destitute women across the industrialised North West.
She is considered to have been ahead of her time in teaching women skills to earn their own living. She would be Britain’s first modern female saint and the first woman to achieve sainthood without being put to death for her faith since the 13th century.
Mother Elizabeth has now been given the title ‘venerable’ by the Vatican – a key step on the road to canonisation. The landmark comes 15 months after Pope Francis canonised the father of the 19th-century revival of English Roman Catholicism, Cardinal John Henry Newman.
Church authorities will now look for evidence of two miracles linked to her name, the final hurdle before achieving sainthood. Sister Dominic Savio Hamer, Elizabeth’s biographer and a member of the order of nuns she founded, the Passionist Sisters, said: ‘We can imitate Elizabeth Prout in many ways and pray to her with confidence.’ She added that Elizabeth was practical, generous and self-sacrificing.
After converting to Catholicism, Prout became a nun aged 28 and was given a teaching post in some of the poorest areas of industrial Manchester, where she later opened a chain of schools and hostels. She set up the Passionist Sisters community – which ran into criticism within the Catholic fold for alleged revolutionary ideas – and required nuns to earn their own wages to support themselves, and teach other women to do the same. Prout died of tuberculosis in Lancashire in 1864.
Her cause for sainthood was submitted in 2008 and theologians have now concluded that she lived a life of heroic virtue and is worthy of the title ‘venerable’ by the Vatican.
If canonised, she would the first English female saint since St Margaret Clitherow, St Anne Line and St Margaret Ward were elevated by Pope Paul VI in 1970. They were executed in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
The most recent female saint who was not put to death for her faith was 11th-century princess St Margaret of Wessex, who was canonised in 1250. Albanian-born Mother Teresa, revered for her work with the poor in India, was made a saint in 2016.