Session Abstract

Women religious have been instrumental in shaping the modern world. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tens of thousands of young women joined Catholic religious congregations dedicated to ameliorating pressing social problems of their time.  From Europe to Africa to the Americas, Catholic sisters thrived as they established schools, hospitals, and missions. Important aspects of nuns’ astounding success were their faith as well as their adaptability to the myriad social and political circumstances they encountered in their work.

This panel explores how place, era, and politics shaped the remarkable and complex stories of modern nuns. The story of the modern nun challenges the master narrative of secularization and highlights the important roles of women in the Catholic Church. All three panelists present new research and fill gaps in the scholarship on women, religion, and Catholic culture. They demonstrate that Catholic sisters are a far cry from the mocking or maudlin portrayals of nuns in popular culture as childlike women or stern disciplinarians, who lived secluded from the contemporary world and lacked all understanding of political and social issues.

In fact, the lives of Catholic sisters in the twentieth century were often controversial, sometimes dangerous, and always political. Panelists reveal the intersection of modern Catholic religious life with politics, conflict, and national identity. Christine Baudin Hernandez shows that the Maryknoll Sisters’ traditional and usually benign mission of serving the poor became a dangerous subversive political activity in war-torn Central America. Hernandez focuses on stories of individual sisters from the sixties to the eighties who interpreted their religious vocation to fit particular places and circumstances. Decades earlier, the Poor School Sisters of Notre Dame exhibited a similar flexibility and pragmatism in their encounter with National Socialism. Martina Cucchiara argues that on account of repeated crises since their founding in 1833, the sisters developed a particular congregational culture that served them well in their dealings with Nazism. Although the Nazis attempted to remove nuns from the public sphere, the Poor School Sisters used their popularity as leverage against Hitler’s regime and created a new mission for themselves that actually increased their visibility and importance in the Third Reich. Kathleen Sprows Cummings reveals that the political engagement of some Catholic sisters does not end with their death. Cummings illuminates the fascinating life and afterlife of the North American saint Elizabeth Ann Seton who founded the women religious congregation of the Sisters of Charity.  Between the 1880 and 1975, people utilized and reinterpreted the life and work of Elizabeth Ann Seton in sometimes contradictory ways to give meaning to their political, social, and religious identities as American Catholics.