Unequal Partners: In Search of Transnational Catholic Sisterhood

By Casey Ritchie Clevenger

When we think of Catholicism, we think of Europe and the United States as the seats of its power. But while much of Catholicism remains headquartered in the West, the Church’s center of gravity has shifted to Africa, Latin America, and developing Asia. Focused on the transnational Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Unequal Partners explores the ways gender, race, economic inequality, and colonial history play out in religious organizations, revealing how their members are constantly negotiating and reworking the frameworks within which they operate.

Taking us from Belgium and the United States to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sociologist Casey Clevenger offers rare insight into how the sisters of this order work across national boundaries, shedding light on the complex relationships among individuals, social groups, and formal organizations. Throughout, Clevenger skillfully weaves the sisters’ own voices into her narrative, helping us understand how the order has remained whole over time. A thoughtful analysis of the ties that bind—and divide—the sisters, Unequal Partners is a rich look at transnationalism’s ongoing impact on Catholicism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226697697

Book preview

Unequal Partners

Unequal Partners

In Search of Transnational Catholic Sisterhood

Casey Ritchie Clevenger

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69741-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69755-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69769-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226697697.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Clevenger, Casey Ritchie, author.

Title: Unequal partners : in search of transnational Catholic sisterhood / Casey Ritchie Clevenger.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019044398 I ISBN 9780226697413 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226697550 (paperback) I ISBN 9780226697697 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur—History. | Monasticism and religious orders for women—History.

Classification: LCC BX4485.3 .CS4 2020 | DDC 271/.97—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044398

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

ONE / Batteries, Crosses, Solar Panels, and Global Sisterhood

TWO / Julie Is Our Ancestor: Unearthing the Roots of Transnationalism

THREE / Like Night and Day: Sisters’ Personal and Communal Religious Practices in Two Places

FOUR / Pathways to Religious Life for American and Congolese Women

FIVE / A Life of Ministries

SIX / Mission Is Everything: Sisters on the Frontiers of Ministry in Greater Boston

SEVEN / Poverty, Development, and the Challenges of Catholic Sisterhood in the Democratic Republic of Congo

CONCLUSION / Circling Back and Looking Forward

Appendix: Research Methodology

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ONE

Batteries, Crosses, Solar Panels, and Global Sisterhood

Sisters of Notre Dame,

women with hearts as wide as the world,

make known God’s goodness and love

with and among people living in poverty,

through a Gospel way of life, community and prayer.

Continuing a strong educational tradition,

we take our stand with people living in poverty,

especially women and children,

in the most abandoned places.

Each of us commits her one and only life

to work with others to create justice and peace for all.

—mission statement of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur

Sitting in the Congregational Mission Office of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Sr. Ellen made a call to electrical engineer Louis Casey. I really have a problem [in] schools and hospitals in Africa, Sr. Ellen told him. As the recently appointed general treasurer of her religious order, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Sister Ellen had just returned from a trip to Africa in which she assessed the needs of local sisters across the continent. Shortly after being elected in 2002, the leader of the congregation asked Sr. Ellen to go and see for herself what was happening in the Global South so that she had some sense of the challenges the approximately three hundred Sisters of Notre Dame in South America and Africa face on a daily basis. Having spent time in South America before becoming general treasurer, Sr. Ellen visited sisters in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe over the next two years, usually staying for two weeks in each place.

During her visits, Sr. Ellen, a fifty-eight-year-old Catholic woman born and raised in Greater Boston, was shocked by how much time and effort sisters in the Global South were devoting to basic survival, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria. Reflecting back on this experience, Sr. Ellen explained to me, "It doesn’t take long to see . . . I mean it takes long to understand, but it does not take long to see just what they are dealing with. One of the congregation-wide calls from the 2002 general chapter meeting was fresh in Sr. Ellen’s mind as she considered the situation: We SNDs [Sisters of Notre Dame] are called to address, as far as possible, issues of translation and equal access to technology and information." Sr. Ellen’s conversation with Louis Casey was the beginning of a two-year partnership to develop a system that could harness solar energy to provide electricity, clean water, and internet access to sisters in Africa, which became known as the African Photovoltaic Project. Sr. Ellen’s efforts were also part of a wider movement among women’s religious institutes in the United States to address the inequalities dividing Catholic sisters in the Global North and Global South.¹

Brisk and serious, wearing a blue-and-green-plaid jacket with dark slacks and a belt, Sr. Ellen had an air of efficiency as she paused to show me the materials she had gathered in advance of our meeting. Clicking through photographs of her last trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo on a large desktop computer, Sr. Ellen explained how difficult it was initially to convince Congolese and Nigerian Sisters of Notre Dame that the African Photovoltaic Project was worthwhile, as the leadership of both African provinces² had been skeptical. They had a number of critical questions they wanted answered before it moved forward: Who would know how to use it? What would the impact of solar energy be on the village? What were the politics of the project? Congolese and Nigerian sisters had previous experiences with international development organizations providing complicated and expensive technology. After the organizations left, nobody knew how to maintain or repair it. Even though these women were members of the same Catholic religious order as Sr. Ellen, they feared a similar scenario would result. Sr. Ellen paraphrased the reaction she initially received from African sisters: No. There are so many of you Americans and you think you know everything and you do not.

Recognizing the initiative would not succeed without the investment of local sisters, Sr. Ellen proceeded carefully. Between 2002 and 2006, the Sisters of Notre Dame focused on design elements, fund-raising, and training opportunities for Congolese and Nigerian sisters. In 2004, the congregation received matching grants from the Conrad N. Hilton Fund for Sisters and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to support the project. Concerned about the feasibility of the proposed photovoltaic system, Hilton funders asked the Sisters of Notre Dame to build a prototype, which Louis Casey did the following year at the Cuvilly Arts and Earth Center, an ecologically sustainable farm and school on the congregation’s Ipswich property.³ Between 2005 and 2010, systems were installed in convents across Fugar, Nigeria (2005); Ngidinga, Congo (2006); Awkunanaw, Nigeria (2008); and Kitenda, Lemfu, and Pelende, Congo (2010). Materials were shipped in wooden crates and unloaded and unpacked on site. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Congolese sisters helped dig trenches for the cables, and workers carried panels to the roof for installation. Throughout the process, sisters and community members in each location worked side by side, receiving training on how to build and maintain the new equipment. When completed, each three-hundred-thousand-dollar system included solar panels for electricity, batteries to store electricity for up to seven days, and a satellite for communication and internet access.

After meeting with Sr. Ellen on that cold morning in January, I left the warmth of the Congregational Mission Office and walked quickly to my parked car. Before turning left out of the parking lot, I stopped momentarily at the life-size bronze statue of the congregation’s foundress, St. Julie Billiart, standing upright with one arm around a young girl holding a book and the other lifted to the white winter sky. The limestone wall behind Julie proclaimed the Notre Dame motto Ah! qu’il est bon le bon Dieu! (How good is the good God!) in thin rainbow lettering above her head.

---

Fast-forward six months and I am traveling with Congolese Sisters of Notre Dame between Kimwenza, Kisantu, and Lemfu. Climbing into a spacious white SUV with eight other women from the provincial house, I could hardly contain my enthusiasm to be on the road. Sr. Maryse made sure I was seated in front by the window, telling me to enjoy the view while she double-checked that the front door was firmly closed. Sr. Thérèse, a slight forthright medical doctor, and the friendly middle-aged male driver sat beside me. Before we pulled out of the heavy front gates, Sr. Élodie spoke sharply from the back seat, asking Sr. Thérèse if my seat belt was securely fastened.

Leaving Kimwenza, my eyes remained fixed on the changing landscape outside my window as it gradually transformed from the busy urban life of the Cité Verte commune to rolling hills green with vegetation and tall slim palms waving at a cloudless blue sky. Much to Sr. Thérèse’s amusement, I asked the name of every village we passed through during our two-hour drive, writing our location down in my tiny pocket-sized notebook. I was surprised by the paved road winding between Kimwenza and Kisantu on National Highway 1, unusual for the region. It was much smoother than the rough potholed-dirt ascent I had previously taken from the heart of the capital to the plateau where Kimwenza sits. On a good day, the roughly thirty kilometers between the N’djili Airport in Kinshasa and the provincial house in Kimwenza takes an hour to navigate; on a bad day, with poor road conditions, construction delays, and dizzying traffic (embouteillage), it may take five times longer. After my experience jolting through that congestion, I appreciated the clear open highway that took us all the way to Kikolo, where we turned onto the last stretch of bumpy red dirt toward the city of Kisantu.

Figure 1.1. Statue of St. Julie Billiart in Ipswich, Massachusetts

When I left the Kisantu convent a few days later, the three sisters I traveled with all covered their mouths and faces with scarves to avoid breathing the dust as we rocked back and forth along the deteriorating route to Lemfu. Upon arrival, Sr. Jacqueline greeted me in French as I climbed out of the jeep and explained that the superior of the Kisantu community had called ahead to tell her I was coming. A short handsome woman in her late forties with a round face and bright, expressive eyes, Sr. Jacqueline did not waste any time; she instructed me to follow her to the small redbrick convent, which had a slanting crimson tin roof and an enclosed front porch with a turquoise stripe crossing its cement railing. Speaking more directly with me than the other Congolese superiors I met in Kimwenza and Kisantu, she talked quickly as she showed me the grounds of the primary and secondary schools. I caught my first glimpse of the African Photovoltaic Project when she pointed out the large solar panels that provide energy for the compound. We made our way through a gate to the adjoining cluster of buildings that house the photovoltaic system.

Looking around a room with elevated black boxes standing tall on one wall like a gigantic stereo and two rows of large rectangular red batteries stacked on the floor along another wall, I felt as if I had stepped into the future. After pointing out different pieces of equipment, Sr. Jacqueline gestured for me to follow her into the internet cafe, an adjacent room where lengths of printed cloth were draped over tables of computer monitors and keyboards to protect them from the ever-present dust. Looking at the unfamiliar surroundings, it might have been difficult to appreciate the distance and terrain these boxes, batteries, and computers had traveled if I had not experienced for myself the journey from Kinshasa to Lemfu, giving me some small sense of the country’s infrastructure. The physical distances these objects traveled and the relationships that made their journeys possible are at the heart of the transnational story I tell in this book.

Together We Form One: Constructing Transnational Identities

My conversation with Sr. Ellen about the birth of the African Photovoltaic Project was my first glimpse into the complicated relationships among Sisters of Notre Dame around the world. Sr. Ellen’s story of collaboration and negotiation with Congolese and Nigerian sisters left me wondering how transnational religious identities are formed, sustained, and challenged in different contexts. At the beginning of this study, it seemed to me that the questions African sisters posed to their Western counterparts concerning access to specialized knowledge, technology, global influence, and local control were questions at the nexus of most partnerships between groups of people in the Global North and Global South. Although there is ongoing popular and scholarly interest in the ways globalization shapes contemporary social life, we still know very little about transnational organizations like the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur or how they influence members’ everyday lives and experiences on the ground. We know even less about how this happens when religion is a defining aspect of the organizations in question.⁴ Throughout this book, I explore the relationships between US and Congolese Catholic sisters who belong to a single religious organization deliberately constituted across national borders, asking how members work together across boundaries of race, ethnicity, and economic development. I focus on the ways sisters construct their religious and social identities through everyday practices and consider the extent to which members orient their lives to both local and transnational communities.

At times, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur I met in the United States and the Democratic Republic of Congo seemed to have very little in common aside from wearing the same square bronze cross engraved with the initials ND on one side and the motto Ah! Qu’il est bon le bon Dieu on the other. When I talked with US sisters in the provincial offices, at their ministry sites, or in the sitting rooms of community houses across Greater Boston, they were usually dressed in modest street clothes—slacks or boxy ankle-length skirts paired with simple blouses, sweaters, and practical loafers. Most sisters wore the Notre Dame cross around their neck, while some opted for a smaller version, no bigger than a quarter and pinned to a collar or lapel. [The] big ones, they are really heavy right in the neck, one sister commented, pointing to the little cross pin on her collar as we talked in the home office of her Brighton community. Whether engaged in teaching, direct service, pastoral ministry, or organizational leadership, these women have practiced choice of ministry since the 1970s. They rely on processes of individual discernment as they work to align personally fulfilling work with the needs of the surrounding community and the larger congregation. Unless retired or recovering from an illness, surgery, or other health issue, most reside in either an apartment with one or two others or a large house with a handful of sisters in neighborhoods across Greater Boston. A growing number live alone. Not surprisingly, personal and communal religious practices vary widely across these different types of living arrangements.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, I sat with sisters in community rooms and outdoor pavilions on the grounds of convent compounds in Kimwenza, Kisantu, and Lemfu. Congolese Sisters of Notre Dame have better access to transportation than most of their neighbors, navigating the long distances between their convents in the Lower Congo or the rough road from the provincial house to downtown Kinshasa in large sports utility vehicles. Nevertheless, daily life takes place within a much smaller radius. Deeply rooted in the community, the more Durkheimian expression of religious life evident within the Congo-Kinshasa Province depends on each member’s full integration and participation in collective practices. Sisters gather for morning and evening prayers in the convent chapel as part of the Liturgy of the Hours and eat three communal meals a day in the réfectoire. Within the compound, most wear brightly patterned African prints wrapped around their waists in long pagnes with different colored cotton T-shirts sporting various peace and justice slogans.⁵ Apart from the Notre Dame cross, Congolese Sisters of Notre Dame do not wear any jewelry and twist scarves carefully around the crowns of their heads to form the perfect circle of a kitambala that frames the face.

In public, Congolese sisters dress more formally in tailored blouses with long, slightly puffed sleeves and matching pagnes. Adopted in response to the authenticité campaign launched by President Mobutu Sese Seko in 1971 to promote a stronger postcolonial national identity,⁶ this style of dress is common among local women’s religious orders. When the province gathers for vow ceremonies and other celebrations, the community tailors clothing from a common fabric to express a sense of unity. The fabric may be patterned with bold geometric designs; the religious imagery of crosses, churches, and depictions of Mary and Jesus; or personalized congregational symbols.⁷ During the summer of 2012, I often noticed sisters wearing navy-blue fabric dotted with a pattern of small yellow stars, red flowers, and tiny banners proclaiming 1959–2009, made to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Congolese branch of the Sisters of Notre Dame.

Most Congolese Sisters of Notre Dame work in congregationally sponsored schools and dispensaries adjoining the convents where they live. In contrast to Boston, where sisters were invited by pastors in the mid-nineteenth century to teach in parish schools and reside in church convents owned by the archdiocese, Congolese sisters own the land surrounding their schools and convents. Before Congolese independence in 1960, the Catholic Church occupied a privileged position within the Belgian colony. As part of King Leopold II’s 1906 concordat with the Vatican, Belgian Catholic missionaries in the Congo Free State⁸ received generous state subsidies along with hundreds of acres of land still owned by religious orders today.

Despite the dramatic differences in the lives of Congolese and American Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, which are reflected in the chapters of this book, these ethnonationally distinct groups of women frequently told me that they are all members of one family, immediately recognizable to one another as daughters of Julie. Pointing to the cross around her neck during our meeting in Ipswich, Sr. Ellen told me, We were all from the same roots, so everybody knows each other . . . I mean not everybody knows everybody, but there is a sense of unity. Even if I’ve never met you before, if you have this cross on, I know who you are. Shortly after returning from an education conference in Boston, Sr. Aurélie sat on a couch across from me at the provincial house in Kimwenza and spoke slowly and purposefully: If you have my cross, you are my sister and we can speak, we can laugh, we can play, we can go for a walk, and together, we form one. Gesturing to an American sister sitting beside us, she explained, I know that she is a Sister of Notre Dame. We have the same foundress, we have the same spirituality, we live the same charism, and so we are daughters of the same mother.⁹

Across the globe, Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur claim common roots as members of a Catholic women’s religious institute founded by a French woman in 1804 and planted in US and Congolese soil by Belgian missionaries in 1840 and 1894. Feelings of kinship and the organizational metaphor of the family notwithstanding, these ethnically, nationally, and geographically distinct groups of women are raised in different cultures. They speak different languages and live out their three religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in divergent economic, political, and social contexts. In each of the sixteen countries where Sisters of Notre Dame formed lasting communities and attracted local religious vocations, there is a singular story of departure, arrival, survival, adaptation, incorporation, and the localization of religious life.¹⁰ This book explores these unique histories by showing how US and Congolese women localized European religious life within global hierarchies built on legacies of colonization, development, and economic inequality across the Global North and South. Considering the varied experiences of US and Congolese members, I ask questions about how transnational religious identities are maintained in different contexts: How is a sense of transnational belonging sustained through objects, texts, travel, communication, and other technologies? As organizations grow globally and come to adopt local forms in new places, where are the points of tension between the transnational and the local?

Figure 1.2. Map of the Democratic Republic of Congo

Source: Prepared by Jennifer Carlton

Earlier studies of global migration typically characterize transnationalism as the back-and-forth movements of people between sending and receiving countries.¹¹ Less attention was given to the multidirectional relationships between people who belong to groups constituted across national borders. Sociologist Peggy Levitt challenged these assumptions by drawing attention to religion as an under-explored site of transnational belonging and showing how global religious institutions enable immigrants to participate in two cultures at once.¹² Arguing that travel is not a prerequisite for transnational activity, Levitt found that individuals who are primarily rooted in a single location may also be bound to people and resources in another country—located within a topography that crosses borders.¹³

Transnational scholars conceptualize the social and material ties that bind people and places in a number of ways. Proposing a transnational social-fields approach to studying the networks of social relationships through which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed, Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Shiller distinguish between the existence of transnational networks and the consciousness of being embedded within them.¹⁴ Because membership in a transnational organization does not necessarily encourage attachments to multiple settings, they argue that individuals who engage regularly in relationships and practices that cross borders exhibit a transnational way of being, and those who recognize this and combine their actions with an awareness of the transnational aspects of their identities express a sense of belonging.¹⁵

Other scholars argue that a focus on transnational networks enables scholars to conceptualize topographies that stretch beyond the nation without neglecting the importance of place and the ways in which transnational processes remain local at all points.¹⁶ Geographers David Featherstone, Richard Phillips, and Johanna Waters define transnational networks as overlapping and contested material, cultural and political flows and circuits that bind different places together through differentiated relations of power.¹⁷ Drawing from actor-network theory, they argue that transnational spaces, identities, and processes are dynamic, contested, and ongoing rather than fixed.¹⁸

Both transnational social-field and transnational network scholars focus on the social meaning people ascribe to their participation in unequal transnational processes. Levitt and Shiller explain this identity formation in terms of awareness, consciousness, and a sense of transnational belonging. Featherstone, Phillips, and Waters ask whether transnational networks are primarily materially constituted through the movement of people and objects or dependent on the formation of collective identities and imaginative geographies of connection that include sympathies, affinities, cultural identification, or shared projects and politics.¹⁹ This book draws on both approaches to explore the religious topographies that enable Sisters of Notre Dame to embrace collective identities as women with hearts as wide as the world and to claim they are at home whenever they meet other members of their order. In the chapters that follow, I show how the material, cultural, and political ties that have developed between Belgian, US, and Congolese Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur are historically rooted and have been temporally constructed within the context of Christian evangelization, imperial rule, and globalization.²⁰ As evident across these national settings, mobile religious communities like the Sisters of Notre Dame are received differently depending on formal and informal relationships between places as well as the degree of separation between church and state.

The transnational relationships between Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur have both material and symbolic dimensions that are intertwined within shared organizational texts, institutional frameworks, leadership structures, finances, and technologies. They are also present in religious artifacts like the crosses sisters wear or the beloved images of the order’s two foundresses, St. Julie Billiart and Françoise Blin de Bourdon, that can be found in most Notre Dame communities. At the organizational level, formal transnational relationships between different branches of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur are evident in the flow of physical, economic, and human resources between regions. Not every member of the organization has the opportunity to travel across provinces, attend the general chapter meetings that take place within the congregation every six years, or participate regularly in international conferences on education, religious formation, or spirituality. Still, the formation process (through which each sister begins the stages of discerning a call to religious life before making a lifelong commitment to a religious order) exposes her to the distinct history and spiritual mission, or charism, of the Sisters of Notre Dame, as well as the broader organizational goals and practices that guide the community across geographic settings.²¹

At the individual level, I find that although many Sisters of Notre Dame move through transnational networks and enter transnational social spaces, most leave with their local identities intact.²² Sisters belong to a transnational network that shapes their access to various resources, experiences, and personal relationships, but these ties are not typically the most significant or defining aspects of their daily lives within the organization. US and Congolese sisters who have opportunities to experience the internationality of the congregation through their own travels and leadership positions are more likely to combine their actions with a sense of transnational belonging. The sense of belonging to a global community that is able to act in different places around the world is especially meaningful for US sisters faced with declining membership in the United States. For the most part, however, transnational influences flow between regions through formal organizational pipelines that have less influence on sisters’ everyday practices. With few exceptions, Sisters of Notre Dame remain deeply embedded in their local contexts. In the words of Sr. Jo, an American sister, Locally, where I am, has probably shaped me the most. For the majority of Sisters of Notre Dame, the watershed moments of religious life—from the decision to become a sister to the discernment of new ministries—are most directly influenced by the regional settings where they take place. These stories reveal the stickiness of place and demonstrate how members of transnational organizations and networks may remain embedded in place, unable to escape their local context despite being transnational.²³ Nevertheless, while the local may matter the most for individual Congolese and American sisters as they form collective identities, it is impossible to understand why or how this is the case without looking transnationally at the uneven terrains on which different groups of women within the organization construct their lives.

Unequal Partners

As Sr. Ellen worked with other leaders to make plans for the African Photovoltaic Project in 2002, she was inspired by firsthand observations of how radically different sisters’ lives were across the continent and was moved by the organization-wide call to address equal access to technology and information for Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur around the globe. Although the project is innovative in its approach—incorporating training for Congolese and Nigerian sisters and developing environmentally sustainable technologies—it is also part of a longer history of unequal exchange of ideas, practices, and resources between Catholic sisters in the Global South and Global North.

The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur was one of approximately four hundred new Catholic women’s religious institutes founded in France and dedicated to socially oriented work between 1800 and 1880. Two hundred thousand French women entered religious life during this period, many with the desire to join male missionaries doing work overseas.²⁴ When European governments began enlarging their territories and establishing new colonies across Africa and Asia, imperialists in France and Belgium welcomed the participation of Catholic sisters, whom they perceived as a reliable, compliant, and inexpensive workforce that could provide a domesticating influence.²⁵ Although missions outside the West received the most attention, European sisters also began ministering to growing immigrant populations across North America, Australia, and New Zealand.²⁶

When missionary sisters began evangelizing Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, they initially had no intention of welcoming local women into their communities. The first African sisters entered diocesan orders that were established specifically for local women and only later were admitted into the international congregations that first introduced women’s religious life to the region. As Jane Wakahiu argues, The formation of religious institutes in Africa was an unintended consequence of missionary presence in Africa.²⁷ While there were at least seventy indigenous orders on the continent by 1949, most novitiates were established in the 1960s and 1970s following the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) and the rise of African independence movements.²⁸ Alongside new developments in liturgy and consecrated religious life within the church, Vatican II initiated outward renewal by calling for deeper engagement and dialogue with other cultures and religions.²⁹ Even after local women were formally welcomed into religious life, they faced immense obstacles, enduring the ethnocentrism of the missionary sisters who formed them and discouragement from their families for giving up the valued roles of mother and wife.

Despite such precarious beginnings, Africa is one of only two continents in the world where women’s religious vocations continue to grow.³⁰ Over the past decade, there has been an increase of 12,786 sisters making temporary or perpetual vows. This growth is taking place primarily in western (23 percent), eastern (29 percent), and central (19 percent) Africa amid declines in northern (−21 percent) and southern (−9 percent) Africa. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the number of sisters has grown from 7,799 in 2005 to 9,459 in 2015, a 21 percent increase in ten years. Women religious in Congo make up 58 percent of sisters in Central Africa, account for 64 percent of growth in the region and almost 13 percent across the continent.³¹

Figure 1.3. Percentage growth of Catholic sisters in Africa by region (2005–2015)

Source: Bibiana M. Ngundo and Jonathon Wiggins, Special Report: Women Religious in Africa (Washington, DC: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 2017)

Figure 1.4. Catholic sisters in Central African countries

Source: Bibiana M. Ngundo and Jonathon Wiggins, Special Report: Women Religious in Africa (Washington, DC: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 2017)

Social scientists have noted that the center of gravity within the global church is shifting from Europe and North America to Asia, Africa, and South America.³² However, the few sociologists who turn attention to membership in religious orders outside North America and Europe paint religious life in the Global South with broad brushstrokes, often drawing on general country-level data and unexamined assumptions about life in developing countries.³³ This research glosses over the specific cultural, political, economic, and religious histories that distinguish Catholicism in different regions and ignores important variations that may explain differences in membership as well as the empirical realities of how religious life is practiced on the ground.³⁴

Religious leaders, journalists, and scholars have focused greater attention on the declining number of Catholic sisters in the United States and Europe. This work paints a vivid picture of the internal and external changes in religious life since the Second Vatican Council, both demographically and qualitatively, but does not examine what the transformations of the past five decades mean from the standpoint of women in the Global South.³⁵ During the reforms of Vatican II between 1962 and 1965, Catholic sisters witnessed the church’s most sweeping transformations in centuries as it promoted greater openness and aggiornamento (updating), and sparked a renewal process among religious orders. Vatican II also made clear that Catholic sisters were laity and not members of the clergy, yet their vows and membership within a religious institution clearly separated them from other Catholic laypeople. In response to the mandate of council documents such as the 1965 Perfectae Caritatis (Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life) and the 1966 Ecclesiae Sanctae (Governing of the Holy Church) on the implementation of council decrees, US sisters rewrote the constitutions of their orders; reexamined their ceremonies, prayers, and rituals; and abandoned many of the rigid rules of obedience and conformity within community life.³⁶ In the wake of these changes, many women made the decision to leave religious life and fewer and fewer decided to enter. The number of Catholic sisters in the US began a steep and rapid decline from 179,954 in 1965 to 45,605 in 2017, a 75 percent decrease in vocations in a little over fifty years.³⁷ With few new vocations and rapidly aging membership, the future of women’s religious institutes in Europe and North America is uncertain. In light of these downward trends, the number of young women entering diocesan and international orders of sisters in Africa has brought renewed interest to discussions of religious vocations.³⁸

The growth in attention paid to the experiences of African sisters has been driven by religious orders as they look to the Global South for new life and has been encouraged by US philanthropists through the efforts of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, GHR Foundation, and others. Although most observers recognize that vocations in Africa and Asia are unlikely to reverse broader demographic declines, donor interest in global sisterhood is shining new light on the work African sisters are doing across the continent. The most prominent example is the Hilton Foundation, which established the Hilton Fund for Sisters in 1986 and has awarded a total of $133 million in grants to 537 religious congregations across 151 countries.³⁹ In 2013, the Hilton Foundation’s Catholic Sisters Initiative launched a five-year strategy to enhance the vitality of Catholic sisters and their work to advance human development around the globe, concentrating on sisters in the United States and Africa during its first