“Just Dedicate Your Life to Work in the Sisters” Mission: The Experience of Two Canadian Communities of Women Religious in the Caribbean and Central America

In the aftermath Ad Gentes: On the Missionary Activity of the Church and the Latin American Bishops’ Medellin Accord, Canadian communities of women religious accelerated and diversified their overseas missionary activities. This paper studies the experience of  two communities of Canadian women religious in the Caribbean and Central American. Both the Sisters of St Joseph of Toronto and the Grey Nuns of the Immaculate Conception had missionary involvement in the Pre- Vatican II era and strong links to other missionary communities of both men and women.  In the case of the Grey Nuns, their association with the priests of the Scarborough Foreign Missions had taken their sisters to prerevolutionary China.  The post Vatican II missionary involvement of both communities is a powerful history of  commonalities, contrasts and contradictions: of despair and hope; failure and success; peace and violence

Set within the current literature on social, women’s and educational history, this paper mines data drawn from convent archival sources and oral histories.  The latter provides a particularly rich source from which a portrait of the complex and compelling world of missionary sisters can be drawn. In the words of one participant, "Doing an oral history … brings alive not only the things that have happened in our community but a lot of the graces and blessings we have that sometimes we appreciate but do not verbalize or express."