Maude Dominica Mary Petre FCM (4 August 1863 – 16 December 1942) was an English Roman Catholic nun, writer and critic involved in the Modernist controversy.
[1] In 1890, Petre joined the Daughters of the Heart of Mary, a community founded in France during the French Revolution and following patterns of life innovative with respect to the more traditional female religious institutes.
[5] When Tyrrell was expelled from the Jesuits in 1906, Petre, who had bought Mulberry House in Storrington, Sussex, had a cottage built for him in the garden[6] and settled an annuity on him.
[7] In 1907, when Petre's book Catholicism and Independence: Being Studies in Spiritual Liberty was published, she was refused permission to renew her vows in the Daughters of the Heart of Mary.
The evident sympathy that she showed for Tyrrell in his quarrel with the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church led to her work being placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Holy See in 1913.
This increased her own difficulties with the Catholic hierarchy, but her loyalty to Tyrrell's memory continued with her publication of his Essays on Faith and Immortality in 1914 and a collection of his letters in 1920.
In her 1915 book, Reflections of a Non-Combatant, she was critical of the unthinking patriotic euphoria of the early stages of the war and showed some sympathy for the ideals of pacifism.
But her 1925 book The Two Cities, or Statecraft and Idealism showed her commitment to internationalism and the need for a genuine reconciliation of peoples beyond mere political agendas in the post-war period.