The SCAC Initiative
Catholic women religious have shaped the contours of St. Louis’ cultural, economic, and political landscapes from the city’s origins in the mid-eighteenth century to today. Their archives are rich repositories of documents, visual resources, and artifacts that demonstrate the centrality of women religious to the histories of migration, colonialism, mission, Indigeneity, enslavement, education, segregation and desegregation, healthcare, and social reform.
SCAC is an initiative partnering the Center for Research on Global Catholicism at SLU with archivists at multiple independent local Catholic archives to increase the visibility and accessibility of their collections. This public-facing project aims to strengthen our community of students, teachers, researchers, and archivists by providing the resources, networks, and opportunities they need to collaborate across the United State and around the world in advancing scholarship on global Catholicism.
Center for Research on Global Catholicism (CRGC)
The Center for Research on Global Catholicism (CRGC) at Saint Louis University supports scholarship at the nexus of Catholicism and culture, providing robust programming that promotes interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and methodological innovation.
The CRGC mission
Objectives
Why are the histories and archives of women’s congregations important?
Despite St. Louis’s prominent Catholic heritage, the nuns who established the schools, hospitals, social service agencies, and asylums that formed the backbone of the city’s social infrastructure are often overlooked in public discourse and excluded from traditional histories of city “founders.” The women’s congregations who shaped these enduring civic institutions not only influenced the trajectory of St. Louis, but as they sent out sisters to set up similar foundations across the United States and around the world, they created networks of influence that spanned the barriers of geography, class, race, and gender. The archival collections that document these wide-ranging activities illuminate the history of St. Louis as a globally-connected city. However, most scholarship considers nuns primarily as the protagonists of a Catholic story, neglecting their broader significance in American and global contexts. Furthermore, traditional narratives of imperial expansion focus predominantly on male figures: explorers, merchants, soldiers, and occasionally, the lone male missionary. However, by 1850, this landscape had been reshaped by contingents of women religious who supplanted the male missionary as educators, nurses, and evangelizers. Their vital contributions, characterized by everyday acts and a self-effacing mentality, remained largely invisible to both their contemporaries and later historians.
Shifting our focus to the work of women religious, specifically their contributions to building institutions of care in national and transnational contexts, allows us to reconceptualize the study of urban development with healthcare and educational complexes at its core. Because Catholic sisters built and managed institutions that served populations well beyond the Catholic community, a close examination of their archives uncover the experiences of a diverse cross-section of the urban population who are often not featured in standard histories of urban development. These include the ill, orphans, children, immigrants, and non-Catholic populations who relied on the institutions run by sisters.
What research questions can the archives of women’s congregations help answer?
Global Perspectives
- How did Catholic sisters in St. Louis participate in global flows of ideas, technologies, finance, and other cultural elements? How did they translate and transform global flows into the local context?
- How were Catholic sisters in St. Louis embedded within broader global networks of care, education, and social welfare that reached beyond Europe to Africa, Asia, and other regions? What were the implications of these networks for local and global communities?
Definitions of “mission” and “missionary”
- To what extent do the experiences of female missionaries in St. Louis offer a broader framework for understanding the evolving roles and identities of women in religious and social spheres in global contexts?
- How do the archival materials of Catholic sisterhoods in St. Louis reveal the ways in which the terms “mission” and “missionary” were negotiated, contested, and redefined by these female missionaries in response to changing historical and social contexts? What are the implications of these findings for broader fields of study such as American Studies, Women’s History, and Religious Studies?
Education, segregation, desegregation
- What role did Catholic schools and orphanages play in shaping the experiences of Black and white children in St. Louis, and how did these institutions reflect and contribute to broader patterns of segregation and inequality?
Institutions of care
- How did Catholic sisterhoods in St. Louis conceptualize disability care as an integral part of their broader mission of building institutions of care, and how did this approach challenge or reinforce prevailing understandings of missionary work, charity, and social welfare within the context of globalization and urbanization?
Immigration/migration
- How did Catholic sisterhoods in St. Louis, initially founded by French women, transform from ethnically homogenous institutions into diverse religious orders by both recruiting from and serving immigrant populations, particularly German and Irish? How did these dynamics shape the process of “Americanization” for both the sisters and the immigrant communities they served?
Political and spiritual revolutions
- How did the interplay of spiritual and political forces reshape the identities, missions, and global reach of Catholic women’s religious orders?
- How did the evolving spiritual landscape of the Reformation, with its emphasis on active engagement with the world, facilitate the emergence of mobile and missionary-oriented Catholic women’s religious orders? How did this legacy influence subsequent missionary endeavors both within St. Louis and on a global scale?
- What role did political upheavals, such as the French Revolution, American Civil War, and Mexican Revolutions play in the geographic mobility and missionary endeavors of Catholic women’s religious orders?
Please check back soon for the 2026 St. Louis Catholic Archives Visiting Research Grant application link. Deadline: May 1 (2026 The grant offers two scholars up to $3000 to defray […]