Priscilla Lydia Sellon, Anglican Religious
20 November -- Commemoration
If celebrated as a Lesser Festival,
Common of Religious, page 494
Priscilla Lydia Sellon was born probably in 1821. Although
never enjoying good health, she responded to an appeal from
the Bishop of Exeter in 1848 for workers amongst the
destitute in Plymouth. The group of women she gathered
around her adopted a conventual lifestyle and, in the face
of much opposition, she created the Sisters of Mercy. Her
crucial rôle in the revival of Religious Life in the
Church of England was enhanced when, in 1856, her sisters
joined with the first community founded -- the Holy Cross
sisters -- thereby establishing the Society of the Holy
Trinity. She led her community in starting schools and
orphanages, in addition to sisters nursing the sick in slum
districts and soldiers in the Crimea. In her last years,
she was an invalid, dying in her mid-fifties on this day in
1876.