Sister Patricia Harriss 1933-2025

Patricia Harriss CJ

Source: Congregation of Jesus

Sister Patricia Harriss CJ was born into a strongly committed Methodist and Plymouth Brethren family but chose to be confirmed as an Anglican aged 15, remembering this as among the most powerful religious experiences of her life. After university she worked in St Mildred's House, an Anglican settlement for charitable works among the poor on the Isle of Dogs. Six months of ecumenical work in the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius led to doubts about the Apostolic Succession and her subsequent conversion to the Catholic Church and work as an English teacher in a convent school. She had been impressed by a biography of Mary Ward and met sisters of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (now the Congregation of Jesus www.congregationofjesus.org.uk/ ) at theology lectures at the London Newman Society. Attracted by their lively friendliness, open-mindedness and intellectual energy, she entered the congregation in 1959, despite the grief and disapproval of her family.

She moved to the Bar Convent in 1962 as a teacher and remembered the excitement of the years of the Second Vatican Council and her own subsequent studies in theology. In 1972 she became head of St Mary's School in Cambridge. Though not a natural administrator, she guided the school through years of immense change in the educational world and encouraged local clergy to find new ways of encouraging faith among students and adults. In 1977 she joined the Leeds diocese adult religious education team at the request of the bishop, while also being involved in the reform of secondary education in York. The Bar Convent Grammar School, founded by Mary Ward's sisters in 1686, opened up to boys and joined with other Catholic schools in the city to become All Saints comprehensive, while the part of the historic Bar Convent not used for the school became a highly successful bed and breakfast, café and heritage centre ( https://barconvent.co.uk/ )

Patricia's enthusiasm for the Catholic Religious Education Study Evenings, begun at Blackfriars by Fr Gerard Meath OP and Fr Paul Hypher, became the bedrock of her work to extend adult catechesis as well as that of children across Leeds Diocese while she also became president of the York Newman Circle. At the time the diocesan team was very small and worked on minimal resources and stipends, but with some 130 primary schools and more than twenty comprehensives in the diocese they found themselves introducing the new Primary RE syllabus, organising clergy in-service training and parish preparation for the National Pastoral Congress in Liverpool in 1980.

In 1985 she helped to found a new house of Mary Ward sisters in Norwich, with members of the community involved in catechetical/educational work, the RCIA, deanery and diocesan adult religious education, and the work of the Christian Study Centre at the Anglican Cathedral. They also took on hospital chaplaincy and visiting in Norwich Prison, running cookery classes in the Remand Centre and setting up the prison Visitors' Centre, including a crèche where small children could be looked after while their mothers visited husbands and partners. There was outreach to the bereaved, to divorced and separated Catholics and simple ecumenical services to the elderly and to the unchurched in a working-men's club. For Patricia this was the fulfilment of a long-held vision of what religious life might be, with no separation between life and mission.

In 1990 the Soviet Union was collapsing and there were four provinces of Mary Ward sisters who had lived in hiding behind the Iron Curtain during the whole Soviet period. Sisters in Slovakia had petitioned for an English sister to help them as they emerged from Communism, so the ever-intrepid Patricia was sent to Slovakia, where she found a very different Church from East Anglia, with long queues for confession in all the churches before First Friday, a tidal wave of people attending Mass on weekdays as well as Sundays, many young priests but no lay-involvement of the kind she was used to at home. It was a very different form of religious life as well, with older sisters who had taught in the congregation's schools before Communism, the 'Dubček generation which had entered openly in 1968, the year of the 'Prague Spring', and those who had entered secretly while continuing their secular work living in small groups as best they could or with their families, as well as a swarm of enthusiastic new entrants. Much reorganising was required to answer the need for catechists in Slovakia and Patricia helped with this as well as with teaching in the original Mary Ward school in Prešov, founded in 1880, before moving to Bratislava to help with the influx of young sisters entering the order.

In 1993 came more change when she was elected to the general leadership team in Rome, working especially on developing knowledge of the Jesuit Constitutions which the congregation had been allowed to take in their fullest form nearly four hundred years after Mary Ward had first petitioned for them. The following general chapter in 2002 saw her remaining in Rome to help update new congregational legislation but also completing years of global travel to return home - or so she thought. A new community had been started in Novocherkassk in Russia and Patricia was sent there to help in a parish community made up of Armenians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Poles and Volga Germans. Speaking Slovak, she taught herself Russian while also teaching German (in exchange for haircuts), French, Italian and English.

Once the community was properly established Patricia, now in her 70s, returned to the UK and began translating works on Mary Ward from German into English. She became involved in interfaith and ecumenical work as well as translation for various Jesuit publications, while being in charge of the congregation's busy London community. Nearing 80, in 2011 she was asked to re-open the English province novitiate in York as well as working in the archives on the historical background for the Bar Convent Living Heritage Project. She was particularly delighted to have lived to see the fruition of many years' prayer in the coming together of the two branches of Mary Ward's Institute, the Congregation of Jesus and the Loreto sisters as one religious family. She continued with archive work, to use her languages, to work pastorally and continue writing and speaking in public until her death aged 92. It was a remarkably full and varied life, lived with utter dedication. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.