Wimbledon dressmaker
on road to canonisation
By Simon Caldwell

3 July 2009

The Vatican has put a south London dressmaker on the road to canonisation for helping to re-establish an order of nuns wiped out by the Protestant Reformation.

Florence Catherine Flanagan was just 19 years old when she left Wimbledon for Rome with the aim of becoming a Bridgettine nun.

She soon found herself at the forefront of a drive to open Bridgettine convents throughout Europe - including the first in England since King Henry VIII dissolved the order's Sion Abbey that stood on the River Thames at Brentford.

She was so effective that the Vatican has now formally opened her Cause for sainthood.

Cardinal Agostino Vallini, the vicar general of the Diocese of Rome, confirmed in a letter to the order that she has been given the title Servant of God, the first step to becoming a saint.

He has instructed the Bridgettines to begin compile a file on her life, work and writings to investigate if she lived a life of "heroic virtue", at which point she will be declared Venerable. Two miracles will then be sought - one needed to declare her Blessed and the other to canonise her as a saint.

Fr John Henry, the parish priest of St Gregory's Church in Earlsfield, London, has already been contacted by the order to help to find more information about Flanagan's family.

He said that Flanagan, known as "Kitty", was a woman with an heroic dedication and "willingness to up and go to strange countries at a moment's notice and commence new initiatives and make new foundations".

She was born in London in July 1892, the eldest of four children of William, a solicitor's clerk who would become a major in the British Army in the First World War, and Florence, née Murray. She was baptised in St Peter's church, Clerkenwell, before the family moved across the river to Wimbledon.

There she met Fr Benedict Williamson, the parish priest of St Gregory's, who was fascinated by the attempts of Elisabeth Hesselblad, a Swedish convert from Lutheranism, to re-establish the Bridgettines nearly 300 years after the order - founded in the 14th century by St Bridget of Sweden - was obliterated by the Reformation. He briefly succeeded in establishing a Bridgettine male community in his parish. Under his influence Flanagan arrived in Rome in November 1911 with two other English girls to become the first postulants of the revived Order of the Most Holy Saviour of St Bridget.

Flanagan took the religious name Katherine and spent the following decades helping to spread the order by setting up new religious houses.

She became the first prioress of new Bridgettine communities in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, and in Vadstena, Sweden, and Lugano, Switzerland. The order today has religious houses in 19 countries.

Flanagan died in Stockholm in 1941 aged 49 and was buried in the medieval Bridgettine cemetery in Vadstena.

The decision by the Vatican to open her Cause for canonisation comes just months after it also opened the Cause of Mary Richard Beauchamp Hambrough, a Brighton woman who joined the Bridgittines a year after Flanagan.

Mother Riccarda, as she was known to the Sisters, became deputy to Mother Elisabeth, and in the Second World War played a vital role in saving the lives of scores of Jews and Communists by hiding them from the Nazis in her Rome convent, the Casa di Santa Brigida.

The last English women to be made saints were Margaret Clitherow, Anne Line and Margaret Ward who were among 40 English and Welsh martyrs of the Protestant Reformation canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970. Mary Ward, a 17th- century nun from Yorkshire who was persecuted by the Catholic Church because of her radical ideas about the role of women, is expected to be declared Venerable next year.

But the 19th and 20th centuries are likely to deliver at least eight non-martyr British saints, many of them women and converts to Catholicism.

They include Sister Elizabeth Prout, the founder of the Passionist sisters, Mother Frances Taylor, who founded the Poor Servants of the Mother of God, Mary Potter, who founded an order of nursing nuns, and Margaret Sinclair, a Scottish nun who died of tuberculosis while working in the slums of Edinburgh.

Fr Ignatius Spencer, to whom Princes William and Harry are related through their mother, Diana, is also being considered.

The beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman could also be announced this summer.