By Tom Hiney
She lived most of her life in Kolkata and was not widely known outside her community, but the woman chosen by Mother Teresa as head of formation for her Missionaries of Charity, who died in May at the age of 107, was one of the most influential British Catholics of her era.
ON A BEACH in Malta around the year 1927, two Anglo-Maltese sisters were playing near their parents’ beach house when the youngest got her foot caught in something underwater. Gladys Douglas was around 10 years old at the time. Standing on the beach was her elder sister, Doris, who froze in panic as Gladys’ head began to disappear under the water. Realising that she was possibly going to die, Gladys remembered what she had been taught at St Joseph’s, the convent school she boarded at across the bay in Sliema, and made an act of contrition. As soon as she had, she experienced what felt like someone pushing her out of the water. Her foot came loose, and she swam to shore. When she reached the beach house, now pale as a sheet, her mother slapped her in the face to get her blood circulating, and sent the servant to buy lemonade.
When she recounted the incident to me nearly a century later, she was again anticipating death, and with much the same composure. She was now called Sr Frederick, she was living in Rome and had become a revered figure among those who knew her to have been Mother Teresa’s special envoy, head of formation, General Secretary and all-round trusted lieutenant, who had played a key role in building up Mother Teresa’s congregation, the Missionaries of Charity. At her funeral at Basilica San Gregorio in May, one cardinal received her coffin into church, another presided, and a message from Pope Francis was read out.
This daughter of a Fulhamborn bank manager, who travelled her whole life on a British passport, was without doubt one of the most influential British Catholics of the modern era. Her father, a lapsed Protestant named Frederick Douglas, had been a government clerk in London when he moved to Malta, serving there in the British Army during the First World War and finding work afterwards with Barclays Bank. Apart from a posting with the bank to Egypt, he stayed in Malta for the rest of his life. He married Elena Vella, a judge’s daughter and at the time of their marriage a lapsed Catholic. Both preferred weekend parties to church, though both would draw closer to faith in later years under Gladys’ influence.
Neither could have anticipated their second-born helping to orchestrate what the Italian journalist Marina Ricci, also present at San Gregorio, described as “an unimaginable revolution of piety”. If you type “inde la faim ina.fr” into a search engine, there are seven minutes of silent French newsreel, never broadcast, of Mother Teresa and Sr Frederick walking through a leper colony outside Kolkata in 1967. With her thick-rimmed glasses, Sr Frederick looks every bit like the teacher she had been before joining the Missionaries of Charity (MC), while Mother Teresa looks more at ease, the natural leader. But the two of them were a formidable partnership, with complementary gifts and a shared commitment to the mission. “Mother the pillar of love, and Sr Frederick the pillar of faith,” as Rome’s regional superior of the congregation put it in her eulogy.
It was the Sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition who ran the school in Malta who first taught Gladys the faith. She was weekly boarding with them from the age of three, the youngest in the school, and grew up listening to the sisters singing the Te Deum together, and gazing enrapt as the priest opened the tabernacle door, thinking the ciborium was a glimpse of Jesus’ shoes. Years later, having joined the same order and teaching at the same school, she would turn her class to face in the direction of the same tabernacle when they prayed. She had made a simple vow of chastity by the time she was 12, and her first religious vows in 1937, aged 21, spending the Second World War serving in Tunis while Malta endured a German siege so fierce that the entire population would be awarded the George Cross.
It was in the 1950s, while teaching at her order’s motherhouse in Marseille, that Sr Helen (as she was then) read about Mother Teresa’s order and their mission to “the poorest of the poor”. She asked for and obtained the necessary permission to leave the congregation of St Joseph of the Apparition and to join the Missionaries of Charity in 1961. She took the name of Sr Mary Frederick. Mother Teresa recognised Sr Frederick’s gifts from the start, and used them at the motherhouse in Kolkata straight after her (second) noviciate. Though she would travel extensively, establishing houses around the world, and serving for a while as regional superior in New York, Kolkata would be her home for most of her apostolate. She associated two eureka moments with becoming a Missionary of Charity that enhanced her already fierce passion for catechesis. Neither was dramatic in a Hollywood sense, but Sr Frederick was English with a bygone sense of duty, and when something mattered to her it mattered a lot.
The first was a realisation that came to her during a retreat – that Scripture was “not just writings, but a person”. The second, as she later described it, was when she realised that Christian baptism was nothing less than a seed of faith and holiness being planted in a human soul by God himself.
When Mother Teresa’s health began to falter in the 1990s, Sr Frederick became for a while both administrator and figurehead of the congregation, and it was she who hosted Princess Diana when she visited Kolkata in 1992. She knelt shoeless with Sr Frederick and the novices and sisters to sing the “Our Father”, before meeting the dying who they were looking after. According to Paul Burrell, her butler, Diana “experienced a spiritual awakening in Kolkata that became the driving force behind every caring act she carried out, every mission and campaign she worked towards. viewed those women as saints. She never considered herself to be one, regardless of some of the labels attached to her image by others … I doubt the princess had ever been so overwhelmed by any other scene in her travels around the world.”
Sr Frederick was strict on faith and morals. Concerned that her professed sisters were being exposed to heresy and error by some of the academics with whom they were studying in Rome in the 1990s, she pulled them all out, and set up her own course in Kolkata, flying in priests she trusted to teach at it, notably Fr John Hardon SJ, now on the first step toward possible canonisation. MC sisters from around the world began to rotate through a yearlong “Spirituality Course”, for which she put together a remarkable handbook called Divine Grace – The Supernatural Life, synthesising a lifetime of devotional and catechetical material. She personally taught the classes on the Second Vatican Council.
Part of the handbook’s genius comes from the fact was that it was not designed to resource intellectual debate, but to equip sisters who were returning to the heart of contemporary urban nihilism, be it in Addis Ababa or Liverpool. Clear doctrine, she believed, helped her sisters to keep loving God and neighbour. Theology was deeply practical for her, the aspiration to “know God as He is”, as she used to say, since it is truth that sets us free. “You can’t love what you don’t know,” she would say to those who accused her of privileging dogma over love. And she was loving. Among her effects was a photograph that had been given to her by a man who had once driven her to an airport and asked her to pray for his two children. She kept the photo, and continued to pray for them by name until her death. In his 2019 book The Day Is Now Far Spent, Cardinal Robert Sarah recalled attending her 102nd birthday in Rome, her face “radiant with purity, divine splendour and joy”. Like Princess Diana, he said that he considered her a “living saint”.
A year before she died, I asked Sr Frederick how she had kept such a strong faith for so many years. “The Holy Trinity is my friend,” she told me. “And the Te Deum every day.” She once asked me: “Do you have a devotion to Our Lady?” “I am trying,” I replied. She was rasping, but still teaching: “On the Cross, he had nothing left but his mother, and he gave her to us.” “Be holy,” she would say every time I saw her. “Be a holy priest.” She was in pain with her feet, but refused painkillers, which made her delirious. When sleep gave her reprieve, I would chat with the sister who had served as her secretary and nurse for two decades, and who would tell me stories about this extraordinary woman. Others came, like me, to be with the two of them. When Sr Frederick finally died the sister told me: “The mission from the bed is over.” She died during a week-long retreat being held at the house in west Rome where the sisters look after destitute mothers and babies, as well as frail MC sisters. The priest leading the retreat that week came into her room one day to give her Benediction and, as he was carrying the monstrance away, she called out, “Jesus, take me to the Father!” She died that evening. The following week, on the day after the funeral, 16 Missionaries of Charity happened to be making their final vows across town, with Cardinal Arthur Roche presiding. The modern Marian basilica was packed and, as the candidates processed in, they looked beaming and utterly focused. It was hard not to see Sr Frederick’s hand in that, or to think of the future of the Church in that moment as anything but safe; uncomfortable, definitely, but supernatural and sound. – The Tablet
