Mary Ward was born on January 23, 1585 at Mulwith in Yorkshire to the noble Ward recusant Catholic family. Educated at the recusant Catholic house of her relatives, Mary undertook the continental Catholic religious vocation in 1606 — travelling to the Poor Clare Monastery at Saint-Omer in the Spanish Netherlands.
In 1609, Mary left the Poor Clares to found her new institute — the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM) at Saint-Omer. The Institute undertook the radical innovations of the women's religious life: no enclosure (women religious living and working outside the cloister), no habit (plain lay dress), no obligation to choir office (instead an apostolic vocation), and direct governance by a female Superior General answerable only to the Pope (in institutional parallel with the Jesuit model — producing the colloquial name 'the female Jesuits').
Mary Ward's radical vision was the systematic free girls' education across Europe — establishing multiple Institute foundations at Liège (1616), Cologne (1620), Rome (1622), Naples (1623), Munich (1626), Vienna (1627), Pressburg (1627), and Prague (1627).
The radical innovations of Mary Ward's institute provoked massive opposition from the Vatican canonical authorities. In 1631, Pope Urban VIII issued the bull *Pastoralis Romani Pontificis* — suppressing the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary and imprisoning Mary Ward at the Anger monastery in Munich for nine weeks.
Released in 1632, Mary Ward spent the 13 years in personal exile — continuing to provide personal spiritual direction to the surviving Institute communities while not holding institutional office.
She died at Heworth near York on January 30, 1645 at the age of 60. The Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary was reconstituted in the centuries and continues to the present day as the Loreto Sisters and the Congregation of Jesus.
Declared Venerable by Pope Benedict XVI on December 19, 2009 — the Vatican recognition of Mary Ward's rehabilitation after the 1631 suppression.