Venerable Mary Potter (1847-1913)

A family divided by faith

Mary Potter was born on 22 November 1847 in Bermondsey, a working-class district of south London, the fifth child and only daughter of William Norwood Potter and Mary Anne Potter, née Martin.^[13][14] Her mother, a Catholic, had all five children baptised in the Catholic faith despite the opposition of her Anglican husband.^[15] A family dispute over an inheritance broke out in 1848: her father left home for Australia, where he made a new life for himself and never returned.^[16][17] Mary thus grew up in a household of women, surrounded by her mother and four brothers, one of whom, William Norwood Potter, would become a recognised chess master.^[18]

Despite this early wound, witnesses describe her as a lively, affectionate and high-spirited child, "the darling of the family".^[19] In 1865 the family settled in Southsea, near Portsmouth, where Mary, who had a lovely voice, sang in the church choir and played the organ for Mass and Benediction^[20] — a sign of an already marked religious sensibility.

Fragile health from the cradle

From birth, Mary Potter suffered from a congenital heart and lung disease that left her with a permanent cough and a respiratory fragility from which she never recovered.^[21][22] This infirmity, far from being a secondary detail in her story, structures her entire vocation: it is precisely because she knew physical suffering and the nearness of death from within that she developed, as an adult, an instinctive compassion for the incurably sick and the dying.^[23] Her frailty caused her to be turned away from the novitiate of the Sisters of Mercy in Brighton — before becoming, paradoxically, the foundation of an entirely new foundation.^[24]

"The only spouse for you is Jesus Christ"

At about nineteen, Mary was introduced by her brother Thomas to Godfrey King, a former aspirant to the Trappist life who had become a teacher.^[25][26] The engagement was announced, but Godfrey, wishing to strengthen his betrothed's faith, gave her spiritual reading — notably the Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin by Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, in Father Faber's English translation.^[27] This reading upheaved Mary: she discovered in it the idea of a total abandonment of self into the hands of Mary, and began to wonder whether marriage was truly compatible with the call she felt growing within her.^[28]

She then consulted Bishop Thomas Grant, Bishop of Southwark, her spiritual director, who answered her without mincing words:

"The only spouse for you is Jesus Christ." — Bishop Thomas Grant, Bishop of Southwark, to Mary Potter, about 1866-1867^[29]

After about four months of engagement, Mary broke it off — to the great sorrow of Godfrey and of her own mother, who could not understand this choice.^[30][31]

The trial of the novitiate with the Sisters of Mercy in Brighton

On Bishop Grant's advice, Mary entered as a postulant with the Sisters of Mercy in Brighton on 8 December 1868, feast of the Immaculate Conception; there she received the name Sister Mary Angela.^[32][33] But her already precarious health deteriorated: after eighteen months she had to leave the novitiate on 23 June 1870.^[34] Her spiritual director at the time, Father Lambert, a Jesuit, discerned however that her vocation lay elsewhere: it was another order that Father Lambert had "chosen for her", as she reported^[35] — an intuition that would prove prophetic: her own vocation would require uniting contemplation with action, a combination her spiritual director already desired for her.^[36]

Rereading Grignion de Montfort and the interior call

Back home, an invalid, Mary Potter went through two years of severe illness that her biographers describe as a true dark night: prayer brought her no more sensible consolation and, in her biographer's account, she "found no responding chord in her heart".^[37] It was in this darkness, kneeling for long hours before a small ivory crucifix hung on her bedroom wall, that she reread, several times and with new attention, Montfort's treatise that Godfrey King had given her.^[38][39] Little by little, she came to ask her spiritual director, Bishop John Vertue, for permission to consecrate herself entirely and forever to Christ through the hands of His Blessed Mother — permission granted; the act, made on 8 December 1872, would become the permanent foundation of her interior life.^[40]

Recovered, she taught catechism to the children of the Portsmouth military garrison, at Bishop Vertue's request as their chaplain — a charge she carried out for three years, a period in which she "grew both physically and spiritually".^[41] It was then that she felt growing within her, over nearly two years, the conviction that God was calling her to found a new congregation, entirely turned toward prayer for the dying:

"I cannot but feel I have had a call from God to devote myself to help save souls in their last hour. I have been drawn so strongly to pray for the dying." — Mary Potter, to her spiritual director^[42]

Cardinal Manning and the first refusal from Westminster

To clarify her own intuition, Mary drafted a first manuscript which she submitted to Bishop Vertue: he returned it to her, ordering her, under pain of mortal sin, to "drive the whole project out of her head".^[43] Shortly afterwards, Bishop Vertue was transferred as military chaplain to Malta, depriving her of his support. A benefactor named Mr Young, moved by reading The Path of Mary, then proposed to finance a charitable work in Lincolnshire and offered to intervene with Bishop Bagshawe.^[44] For his part, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, to whom Mary had asked permission to recruit helpers in his archdiocese, merely answered her: "Let Miss Potter go home to her mother."^[45] In 1876, Bishop Danell of Southwark likewise refused her the foundation of an order in his diocese.^[46] Mary did not lose heart: convinced that the call came from God and not from men, she kept looking for a bishop willing to listen to her.

The Path of Mary (1878)

From this period of resistance and maturation came her first book, The Path of Mary, written about 1876 to clarify her vision and convince her ecclesiastical interlocutors — Mr Young had already read it before the 1877 foundation.^[47] The work, bearing the imprimatur of Bishop Edward Bagshawe, Bishop of Nottingham, dated 24 June 1878, would remain the founding spiritual manifesto of the Little Company of Mary.^[48][49] It already contains, in germ, what would become the distinctive mark of the congregation: a reading of the history of the Church in the light of Calvary, where trial and fidelity go hand in hand.

"We live in perilous times; we are surrounded by dangers and temptations almost unparalleled in the history of the world." — Mary Potter, The Path of Mary (1878), p. 13^[50]

Bishop Bagshawe and the disused factory

In January 1877, helped by her brother Henry and without informing her mother, Mary Potter took the train to Nottingham to meet Bishop Edward Gilpin Bagshawe, third bishop of the diocese (after Joseph Hendren, 1851-1853, and Richard Roskell, 1853-1874).^[51] Unlike Cardinal Manning, Bagshawe welcomed her project favourably and suggested she settle in Hyson Green, a poor district a few kilometres from the town centre.^[52] Through an Irish neighbour, Mrs Tacey, Mary discovered a disused former hosiery factory: "Yes," she said, "it is here that we shall begin our work."^[53] Bagshawe rented the building in his own name and furnished it sparsely; Mary's first companions — the widow Elizabeth Bryan and Agnes Bray — at first slept on the bare floor, moving the few chairs from one room to another as needed.^[54]

The opening of Hyson Green (Easter 1877)

The opening ceremony of the first convent was fixed for Easter Monday, 2 April 1877: Bishop Bagshawe sang Mass there and dedicated the convent to the Maternal Heart of Mary.^[55] According to another account of the congregation, that of the house in Ireland, it was on the morning of Easter Sunday that the inhabitants of Hyson Green discovered a red cross on the old factory — symbol of the Saviour's Blood.^[56] Two new recruits soon joined the small group: Eleanor Smith, in May 1877, then Edith Coleridge, shortly afterwards.^[57]

The clothing of 2 July, feast of the Visitation

On 2 July 1877, feast of the Visitation — McAuliffe also sees in it the feast of the Precious Blood, then celebrated on the first Sunday of July^[58] — Bishop Bagshawe clothed the five women in the black habit and the pale blue veil that would soon earn the sisters the popular nickname of "Blue Nuns".^[59][60] Mary Potter chose for her community the name of the Little Company of Mary, in reference to the small group of the faithful who alone remained beside Mary at the foot of the Cross while the apostles scattered.^[61] This is the canonical birth certificate of the congregation — just as the red cross that appeared at Easter had been its visible and popular sign.

Deposed after the clothing

The trial was not long in coming: less than two weeks after the clothing, Bishop Bagshawe deposed Mary Potter from her office as local superior, preferring Mother Madeleine (Elizabeth) Bryan to her.^[62][63] (The congregation's detailed biography places the deposition "within two weeks" of the clothing of 2 July; Wikipedia says "after three weeks"; McAuliffe gives no timeframe.) The disagreement concerned the very nature of the congregation: Bagshawe could not conceive that sisters could be at once fully contemplative and fully active — two vocations he judged, in the categories of his time, incompatible.^[64] Mary was then put in charge of begging alms and then appointed mistress of novices; this situation lasted about two years.^[65] Her biographer, Father McAuliffe, reports that Bishop Bagshawe later admitted he had simply been trying her, in every way he could think of, and that never once did she fail him.^[66]

The two mastectomies of 1878

At the beginning of 1878, a large malignant ulcer of the breast was discovered in Mother Mary. The operation, a mastectomy, was performed in precarious conditions — anaesthesia being risky given her fragile health.^[67][68] "She suffered much, but always with patience and gentle considerateness for those who nursed her."^[69] A few months later, the other breast also proved malignant: a second mastectomy was performed, in the same difficult conditions, less than six months after the first.^[70] This double bodily trial, endured in the midst of a crisis of legitimacy within her own young congregation — one may recognise here the spirituality of the victim souls, who offer their suffering in union with Christ for the salvation of souls — joined the offering that would mark all the spirituality she would pass on to her spiritual daughters.

Re-election and the first missions

On 12 February 1879, Bishop Bagshawe convened a chapter for the election of the local superior: Mother Mary received every sister's vote and recovered her office.^[71] She then opened small missions at Quorndon (today Quorn) and at Eastwell.^[72] In 1880, while visiting one of these missions, she contracted scarlet fever and remained seriously ill until the end of the year; the bishop took advantage of her convalescence to open two further missions, entrusted to still inexperienced sisters — a source of keen anxiety for the foundress, concerned for the spiritual soundness of each nascent foundation.^[73]

The audience with Pope Leo XIII

Mother Mary had long desired to obtain the pontifical approval of her congregation's Constitutions. Bishop Bagshawe finally granted it to her, convinced — wrongly — that he was thereby fulfilling the last wish of a dying woman.^[74] On 24 September 1882, Mother Mary left England for Rome, accompanied by Mothers Philip and Cecilia; they arrived on 10 October.^[75] Pope Leo XIII received her in audience and invited her, against all expectation, to remain in Rome, to bring over more sisters and to begin a new work there.^[76] Her health declined so gravely during this stay that her companions believed her dying; she nevertheless persevered in her Roman project.^[77]

The Convent of the Maternal Heart of Mary

At the end of 1874 already, Mary Potter had received, in prayer, an interior conviction: her congregation was called to promote a particular devotion to the Maternal Heart of Mary, which she had represented by an adapted statue — a heart surmounted by the lily of the Virgin's immaculate purity and pierced by the sword of her sorrowful compassion at Calvary.^[78]

"A heart surmounted by the lily of Our Lady's immaculate purity, and pierced by the sword of her sorrowful compassion on Mount Calvary." — description of the statue of the Maternal Heart of Mary desired by Mary Potter^[79]

On 20 May 1884, opening her first Roman house, she obtained from Leo XIII the blessing of its designation as the "Convent of the Maternal Heart of Mary".^[80] The community finally settled near the Basilica of St Mary Major, where it would remain for twelve years; there, with the help of Father Cardella, a Jesuit, Mother Mary drafted the definitive Constitutions of her institute.^[81]

Six sisters for Australia and the grace of Genazzano

In 1885, at the invitation of Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, Archbishop of Sydney, six sisters embarked from Naples for Australia.^[83][84] Mother Mary, barely recovered from typhoid fever, nevertheless travelled to Naples to bless their departure; to the sister in charge of the little group, she recommended with humour that she "procure a pair of spectacles and wear them, to look a little older".^[85] The six sisters arrived in Sydney on 4 November 1885; the foundation stone of the Maternal Heart convent at Lewisham was laid the following year, and a new convent opened at Ryde, on twenty-eight acres, in 1891.^[86]

After the sisters' departure, exhausted, Mother Mary went on pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Good Counsel at Genazzano, under a violent storm that alarmed her travelling companions.^[87] There she experienced what she herself would call a "grace": her health was, against all expectation, restored — to the point that the villagers present spoke of "un miracolo".^[88] In September 1886, Mother Mary and the first four sisters pronounced their perpetual vows.^[89]

Definitive pontifical approval (1893)

A further heavy blow fell in 1888: present at the opening of a foundation at Limerick, in Ireland, Mother Mary was struck by a pulmonary haemorrhage. The English doctor consulted judged the cancer to be progressing rapidly and ordered her back to Rome; Bishop Bagshawe opposed it, but her spiritual director discerned there the will of God — the absolute criterion for Mother Mary, who obeyed at once.^[90] On 18 April 1893, the decree of definitive pontifical approval placed the congregation directly under the authority of the Holy See: Mother Mary Potter became its superior general, answerable henceforth to the pope alone.^[91] In 1903, the mother house settled in Via San Stefano Rotondo, Rome; it was formally inaugurated in 1906.^[92]

Under her direction were also founded the houses of Fiesole (1889), Chicago (1893), Malta (1894) and Port Elizabeth, in South Africa (1904).^[93] Mother Mary had promised, without having time to see them come about in her lifetime, foundations in New Zealand and in Argentina.^[94]

The Calvary Hospital and the chapel of Pius X

In 1908, Mother Mary had built, near the church of Santo Stefano Rotondo, a heart-shaped chapel for the Calvary Hospital, intended to honour the Maternal Heart of Mary.^[95][96] The Roman authorities first opposed it: the papal master of ceremonies objected that this title had "no liturgical use" and refused to authorise it.^[97] Mother Mary persevered; Pope Pius X finally decided in her favour, approved the title and ordered that a commemoration of the Maternal Heart be made at every Mass during the octave of the dedication of the new chapel.^[98] Mother Mary then had a painting made depicting Pius X offering the Church to the Maternal Heart of Mary.^[99] It was there that, in 1908, the first Catholic school of nursing in Italy had begun^[100]; the Calvary Hospital opened its doors the following year, in 1909, according to the Australian memorial.^[101]

The loving slavery of Mary according to Grignion de Montfort

Mary Potter's whole interior life is rooted in the Marian devotion of Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, which she discovered through the books given by Godfrey King and which would henceforth structure her entire existence: the holy slavery — not a servitude, but a total abandonment of self into the hands of the Virgin, by which the soul becomes the instrument of her redemptive work.^[102] It was however to devotion to the Maternal Heart of Mary, received on 8 December 1874, that she applied these words: a "wonderfully efficacious means of prayer"^[103], by which every spiritual work is accomplished "by and through" her maternal Heart.^[104]

Compassion at the foot of the Cross and the Precious Blood

The very name of the congregation — the Little Company of Mary — refers to the small number of the faithful who remained beside the Virgin at the foot of the Cross, when the apostles, save Saint John, had scattered.^[105] For Mother Mary, the vocation of her spiritual daughters consists precisely in doing today what Mary did then: remaining present, in prayer and concrete charity, beside those going through their agony. This Marian Compassion is bound to a precise devotion to the Precious Blood of Christ, whose redeeming fruitfulness Mother Mary saw rising "into the Sanctuary of Mary's Heart" to spread over the whole Church for the salvation of souls.^[106] The founding clothing took place on 2 July, feast of the Visitation; McAuliffe also saw in it a coincidence with the feast of the Precious Blood, then celebrated on the first Sunday of July.^[107]

"Be good religious first…"

Mother Mary absolutely insisted that her sisters remain good religious before being good nurses — she used to repeat to them, according to her biographer: "Be good nuns first, and then you'll be good nurses"^[108] — refusing to let the active service of the sick end up eclipsing the life of prayer which alone gives it its supernatural fruitfulness. Her biographer, Father McAuliffe, summed up this same danger — that of an unbalanced exterior activity undermining the interior life — in a formula he borrowed from an anonymous third party: "Someone has spoken of this over-eager, ill-balanced activity as 'the twentieth century heresy of good works'"^[109] — that is, the temptation, peculiar to an age of social activism, to substitute generous action for intimate union with God, whereas the one must always proceed from the other. It was this intuition that had, as early as 1877, set Mother Mary against Bishop Bagshawe: she refused to choose between contemplation and action, when her bishop saw in them only two irreconcilable vocations. The history of the Little Company of Mary has proved her right.

A gaze upon the trial of the Church

In The Path of Mary, Mother Mary Potter also develops a spiritual reading of the history of the Church, announcing times of trial in which the Spouse of Christ will "mystically reproduce the crucifixion of her divine Head and Master":

"We seem to be now bordering on the times when the Church will mirage, will reflect, will, in fact, mystically reproduce, the crucifixion of her Divine Head and Master." — Mary Potter, The Path of Mary (1878), pp. 18-19^[110]

Those who are Mary's Own, she writes in substance, will stand faithfully through this mystical crucifixion of the Church, Spouse of Christ: when other members of the Lord's Body fall away, they will pass through the fiery ordeal without perishing in it, yet not without suffering.^[111]

These pages remain the private writings of a religious sister, whose spiritual works received the nihil obstat of theologians on 25 July 1952 — nothing contrary to the faith, a step of non-obstruction and not a doctrinal approval of the content — within the instruction of her cause.^[112] They must therefore be received for what they are: a foundress's personal spiritual meditation on the mystery of the Cross applied to the life of the Church — not an oracle guaranteed by the magisterium — but a meditation whose sobriety and fidelity to Scripture (the paschal mystery of Christ's Body, suffering then glorified) is in no way foreign to the most common Catholic Tradition.

Death in Rome, 9 April 1913

Mother Mary Potter died in Rome on Wednesday 9 April 1913, at 6.15 pm, at the age of sixty-five: Father Luke Carey, a Franciscan and long-standing friend, had administered the last sacraments to her on 4 April, and it was while Father Benedict Williamson was reading the commendation of a departing soul that she passed away "without sob or resistance".^[113] Her last words, addressed to her spiritual daughters, were an act of gratitude:

"Thank God always for the happiness and beauty of life — it is beautiful." — last words attributed to Mary Potter, 9 April 1913^[114]

She used to say, of the death she had devoted her life to accompanying in others:

"The hour of death may be called the hour of Birth into God." — Mary Potter^[115]

Servant of God, then Venerable (1988)

The process for her canonisation opened in 1942 — the cause's official page gives this date without naming the actor.^[116] After the instruction of her cause, including the thorough examination of her spiritual writings, Pope Saint John Paul II promulgated on 8 February 1988 the decree recognising the heroicity of her virtues of faith, hope and charity, making her a Venerable — a step this Ignispedia series shares with so many other venerables and servants of God.^[117][118] In accordance with the ordinary procedure, an authenticated miracle obtained through her intercession remains necessary for her beatification (then a second for her canonisation); the cause's official page invites prayer to this intention.^[119]

The return of the relics to Nottingham and the ongoing process

In December 1997, the remains of Mother Mary Potter were transferred from Rome to St Barnabas Cathedral, Nottingham, where they now rest in the north ambulatory, surrounded by prayer cards and books placed at the disposal of visitors who come to seek her intercession.^[120][121] In 2010, the Mary Potter Heritage Centre opened at 32 Regent Street, Nottingham, inaugurated by Bishop Malcolm McMahon, to make her life and work known.^[122] On 13 February 2024, a Mass for her cause of beatification and canonisation was still celebrated at St Barnabas Cathedral — a sign that the process, opened more than eighty years ago, remains actively carried by the Little Company of Mary and the vice-postulation of Nottingham, in liaison with the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.^[123]

Today, the Little Company of Mary is present in 14 countries on five continents — England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Albania, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Tonga and the United States^[124] — perpetuating the union willed by its foundress between contemplative prayer and the most concrete care of the incurably sick and the dying.

• Discover Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716): the spiritual master whose Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin upheaved Mary Potter's life and founded all her Marian spirituality.
• Read Victim souls: the Catholic spiritual tradition to which Mary Potter's bodily trials belong, offered in union with the suffering Christ.
• Discover Venerable Catherine McAuley (1778-1841): the foundress of the Sisters of Mercy, whose Brighton novitiate was, for Mary Potter, a necessary — though uncompleted — step toward her own vocation.
• Read Pope Leo XIII: the pontiff who received Mary Potter in audience in Rome in 1882 and blessed the first Roman house of her congregation in 1884.
• Discover Saint Pius X: the pope who decided in 1908 in favour of the title of the Maternal Heart of Mary for the chapel of the Calvary Hospital in Rome.
• To retain the essentials: Venerable Mary Potter, a woman ill all her life and deposed by her own bishop less than two weeks after her clothing, made her frailty and her trials the soil of a worldwide work — the Little Company of Mary — uniting Marian contemplation at the foot of the Cross with the concrete service of the dying. Declared venerable in 1988, her cause for beatification, opened in 1942, remains actively pursued near Nottingham as in Rome.