The Bishop of Shrewsbury has invited Catholics to pray that a 19th century religious Sister hailed as “the Mother Teresa of Manchester” may be recognised as a Saint.
The Rt Rev. Mark Davies who was born in Longsight said that Mother Elizabeth Prout was one of the most remarkable of all of the famous people from the town because of her work and witness among some of the poorest people of Victorian England.
Mother Elizabeth significantly came to Manchester during the same period that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also visited the city as they prepared to write The Communist Manifesto.
While the two revolutionary philosophers sat together “to formulate the violent theory of Communism; an ideology that would bring still greater suffering to humanity”, said Bishop Davies, “Elizabeth risked violence herself to enter Manchester’s darkest and most dangerous streets in order to reach those in greatest need”.
“If Marx and Engels merely observed the condition of the poor, Elizabeth desired to live and die among them,” the Bishop said.
“She became a sister to the abandoned so they might recognise their own innate dignity as children of God.”
The Vatican has considered the case of Mother Elizabeth Prout, who died in 1864, and is expected to approve the third step on the five-step path to sainthood, in which she is declared “venerable”, before the end of the year.
This will prompt a formal Vatican investigation into two miracles that have been attributed to her by seriously ill people who prayed to her for healing.
In 1999, a woman in Chile said that she recovered from a brain injury after praying to Prout. In 2000 a man, also from Chile, said that his cancer vanished after he prayed to her.
