This paper investigates a painting from the little-known cycle known as The Painted Life that depicts in fifty paintings scenes from the life of Mary Ward (1585-1645), English foundress of an Institute of Religious Women. The image features an angel ministering to an English priest. Both the painting and Ward’s biographers narrate an episode in which Ward and the angel are portrayed as working together to bolster the priest who was wavering in his faith. In light of Mary’s collaboration with the angel, a most unusual concept in  17^th-century iconography, this paper will explore how Ward cultivated a model of devotional practice and missionary purpose attuned to, yet distinct from, contemporary influences such as Ignatian and Jesuit culture.  Mary Ward’s distinctive practices of sensory response to material objects, in particular visual images, demonstrate her strategies for liberating herself and her followers from Tridentine enforcement of enclosure that prohibited Catholic women religious from evangelizing. By re-imagining how these women mediated access to the divine, the paper will examine ways in which gender alerts us to how women emphasised partnership with one another in the task of communicating  belief.