Archbishop of Canterbury at Mary Ward 400 Jubilee Mass

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, gave an address on Mary Ward following the Distribution of Holy Communion at a Mass to celebrate the 400th anniversary of beginnings of the sisters of the Venerable Mary Ward (the Congregation of Jesus, and the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary), in Westminster Cathedral last Saturday.

In his address, the Archbishop pointed to the centrality of the Eucharist and how, through the Eucharist, the Church comes together to discover what it really is and to be renewed in that discovery.  He stated that this process of discovery is a constant process, that it discovers again and again-day by day and century by century—that what it is, is something very simple, viz. the assembly of people contemporary with Jesus Christ: people made alive in their communion with him.

He pointed to the fact that so often, “the church loves to run away from the simplicity of that encounter with Christ.  And yet there at the heart of everything is that fundamental fact than which nothing is deeper and nothing is truer: we are those made alive in communion with Jesus.  And we express it in the supreme simplicity of a physical action.  We eat the bread of life and we take into our bodies the very being of that 'friend of friends' who is Jesus Christ.”

He went on to say that in the life of Mary Ward it is exactly that same eucharistic simplicity that once again arises as a gift for the Church's renewal.

Pointing to the many challenges of Mary Ward’s life, he said that, “the Church of Mary Ward's day didn't really know what to do with her.  It preferred the complications of what people already understood about discipleship and the religious life and particularly the religious life for women.  But Mary Ward raised up in the Church of her day a sign of eucharistic simplicity: verity, sincerity, transparency.”

Referring to an interesting and probably little known connection between Mary Ward and the archbishopric of Canterbury, he said that the bishop of her day had made some very direct remarks about “how dangerous a woman she was.”  A view, which he said, enjoyed, “a level of ecumenical consensus about what a problem she was in her time!”  He went on to say, “But being the holy person she was, she was not going to be intimidated by an archbishop of Canterbury any more than by a pope.  She decided she would visit Lambeth Palace with some of her sisters.  She did so, and the Archbishop was out.  But she left her mark.  She scratched her name on a windowpane.  Whatever else that story says, it says something about holiness and simplicity; about the saints as those whose names are simply scratched on a windowpane against the overwhelming light of the living Jesus.  We cannot look at them and read their names without seeing that light.  And that light comes to us through the saints, illuminating those names, those faces, those histories.

Archbishop Rowan Williams concluded his homily, stating, “We know that the living Jesus continues to work in his saints that eucharistic miracle of simplicity.  And we, the divided and confused Christian churches, pray for that gift of renewing simplicity day by day, and year by year.” 

“We pray that the light of the living Jesus will again give life to the Church, to the religious life, to the institutional life, the political life (we might even say) of our organisations and our communities.  Knowing—wryly and sadly—that the more we think about the 'renewal of the Church', and the 'renewal of the religious life', and the less we think about the eucharistic simplicity of Jesus, so the less easily we shall be renewed.” 

“The verity and simplicity that were at the heart of Mary Ward's apostolate, the longing to be transparent was not simply a virtue confined to Yorkshire women.  It was and is a virtue of Christian women and Christian men and Christian children.  We want to be what we see; we want to be what we say; we want the God whose words are works, to be at work and speaking in our lives as the Word Incarnate lives, speaks and transfigures us in the bread of the Lord's Supper.

The service was part of 'Venerable Mary Ward: Jubilee 400'.

by Gerard Bennett