From Concept to Creation: Mary Ward goes Virtual
Up until this year, the term Twenty-twenty usually referred to normal visual acuity, but it now also means the year our planet was turned on its head by a virus! All aspects of what many thought was a regular routine sort of existence went into a strange rearrangement of activities whereby indoors became the norm, face-covering outside the home became advisable, nooks and crannies in the family home became school rooms, Zoom became a household word, introverts largely loved it, and extroverts largely loathed it!
Social media, Netflix, Google, the App stores, and many other online platforms enjoyed increased patronage and, without the opportunity to travel domestically or internationally, some useful playing and creating took place in some unlikely ways. The creation and launching of the On Pilgrimage with Mary Ward App can be viewed as one such activity!
For many decades, people connected with Mary Ward have enjoyed the opportunity to seek out and enjoy places where she lived, worked, visited, and made significant decisions, as she sought to find God’s will in the early 17th Century.
The family and friends of Mary Ward are greatly blessed in the access they have to an abundance of resources, including research papers and books, videos, photos and recordings, autobiographical writings and reflection material. The archival treasures in various places range from the pilgrim hat, shoes, and rosary beads to the lemon juice letters and signed documents. The recent collection of documents held in the Vatican Archives made a necessary and significant contribution to the cause for her Veneration and, hopefully soon, Beatification and Canonisation.
So, it was that on the 2016 Mary Ward in Europe Pilgrimage for twenty people representing the various province ministries, a creative conversation began around building a mobile application that would guide an individual or small group of pilgrims in times when there was no guide available. In these days of no-one going very far away, the App provides a happy virtual experience of visiting York and Yorkshire, the places of both Mary Ward’s birth and death, London, Saint-Omer in France, Liège in Belgium and finally Munich and Augsburg in Germany. Each place holds a significant part of the story and the App provides historical input, story-telling and opportunities for reflection.
Download the free App for your Android phone, Apple iPhone or iPad and make the pilgrimage from the comfort of your living room!
Author: Sr Sandra Perrett ibvm
