‘Manchester’s Mother Teresa’ could be UK’s 1st female saint
Nun dedicated her life to poor
A NUN known as the “Mother Teresa of Manchester” could soon be a step closer to becoming the first female British saint in modern times.
Elizabeth Prout dedicated her life to helping the poor in the city’s Victorian slums.
Horrified at the squalor amid the mills, she opened schools and refuges for factory girls.
Born in Shewsbury, Shrops, in 1820, Elizabeth converted to Catholicism aged 21 at a time when Catholics were persecuted.
Her parents disowned her, and she moved to Manchester aged 30 to take up a job teaching at St Chad’s school in Cheetham Hill.
She was unprepared for the misery she saw, at a time when Friedrich Engels, visiting the city with Karl Marx as they prepared to write The Communist Manifesto, called it a “hell upon Earth”.
She formed a religious community now known as the Passionist Sisters who supported themselves by teaching and working in the cotton mills. The Bishop of Shrewsbury, the Right Rev Mark Davies, said she “risked violence herself to enter the darkest and most dangerous streets in order to reach those in greatest need”.
He added: “If Marx and Engels merely observed the condition of the poor, Elizabeth desired to live and die among them.”
She died of TB aged 43 in 1864 and has now passed the first two of five stages of sainthood. The
Va t i c a n is expected soon to announce she will be declared “venerable” – the third step. Two miracles are attributed to her. In 1999, a woman in Chile said she recovered from a brain injury after praying to Prout. In 2000 a man, also from Chile, said praying to her cured his cancer. The last three British female saints were put to death under Elizabeth I. Last year Cardinal John Newman who died in 1890 became Britain’s first modern-day saint.