Women Saints.

Women Saints
Kathleen Jones
Orbis, $20, 310 pp.

The Liturgical Press is in the process of publishing all twelve volumes of the newly revised Butler's Lives of the Saints. Kathleen Jones was responsible for revising the June and December volumes. Based on her hagiographical work, she has put together a single volume, Women Saints, which contains forty biographical sketches of female saints from antiquity to the present. Jones divides her saints according to categories (visionaries, martyrs, collaborators, wives and mothers, penitents, outcasts, innovators, and missionaries) and gives us a generous sampling of both well- and lesser-known figures. In the latter category is the former Sudanese slave, Josephine Bakhita (died 1947) whose improbable story ends near Venice where she was a highly regarded religious, and also Blessed Anna Maria Taigi (died 1837), who raised a large family in the squalor of Rome while also, despite a surly and violent husband, serving as confidant to the Roman clerical world of her day.

Those interested in the more arcane hagiographical matters will enjoy the appendices to this readable volume. The first provides an intelligent discussion of the tradition of women living in male monasteries disguised as men. A second discusses the category of "invisible women," saints in their own right who have been overshadowed by their more famous husbands. The final appendix details the terrible experiences of Mary Ward, whose attempts to found an active community of women in the seventeenth century were met with clerical persecution. She died in 1644. Her institute was finally declared founded in 1877, but it was not until 1909 that she was acknowledged as foundress.

In 1978 the Jesuits finally granted her community their constitutions--something she had sought all during her life--333 years after her death. Mary Ward's cause for canonization is yet to go forward in Rome, but when it does one might like to see a new category of saint: a slow martyr at the hands of church authority. Another foundress, Australian Blessed Mary MacKillop (died 1909), whose biography is also in this volume, might well fit the same category.

Women Saints is highly selective in what it offers, but it should spur greater interest in the history of women in the church, which is all to the good. The reference section provides bibliographies of varied comprehensiveness, for further reading in both the categories and the individuals profiled.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.