Making Connections:
A look at the legacies of social activism for Catholic sisters
Exhibit Conclusions: The Big Picture
The decision of Catholic sisters to march in Selma marked a transformative moment in the history of American – and global – Catholic sisters’ social activism. This pivotal act – the choice to bear public witness for change – was not spontaneous. It was the culmination of decades of evolving social consciousness, shaped by the broader historical context of the pre- and post-World War II eras.
For much of their history, Catholic sisters operated within a framework that did not explicitly challenge systemic inequities. Their ministries of care were often constrained by institutional norms and societal expectations. Bound by the conventions of “convent manners,” which emphasized humility, obedience, and silence, sisters exerted influence indirectly, responding compassionately to the effects of – but rarely publicly questioning – the systems that upheld racial and social hierarchies.
Though Selma was a highly visible turning point, it was the outcome of a much slower reimagining of purpose and mission. From the mid-17th century through the early 20th century, Catholic sisters built vast global networks of care, education, and evangelization. The rise of women’s missionary orders and increasing international mobility expanded their reach. By the mid-20th century, sisters had become some of the most highly educated women in the United States – between 1960 and 1990, over 1,600 Catholic sisters earned PhDs. This education, combined with their work among culturally diverse and economically disadvantaged communities, deeply influenced (and in some cases, even radicalized) their understanding of social injustice.
The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) acted as a further catalyst, prompting women religious to reexamine the foundational principles of their lives. Long-held traditions – habits, convent structures, ministries, and missions – were scrutinized and reimagined in light of contemporary needs. The goal was not to abandon core values, but to revitalize them: to preserve the spiritual essence of religious life while shedding customs that no longer resonated.
In this context, the march in Selma became a defining act. Catholic sisters, drawing on their advanced education and expansive institutional networks, stepped out of the private sphere and into public advocacy. Despite longstanding papal discouragement of women’s orders engaging in public activism, these sisters chose to respond to the contemporary needs of the people. Their decision was bold – and risky. Yet it affirmed a new vision of religious life: one grounded in the belief that human rights are God-given and that publicly advocating for those rights is a deeply humanitarian and religious act.
The legacy of that decision is profound.
Their choice to bear witness in Selma had a lasting impact – not only on the Church, but on the national conscience. Interviewing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about the sisters’ participation, journalist John L. Wright wrote that King believed the “participation of the nuns in the Selma demonstrations ‘had a special significance’ in arousing the national conscience to the plight of the Negro because the public knows a nun to be a woman of ‘great sacrifice and dedication.’” According to Wright, King believed that the presence of religious people “identified the Church with the struggle . . . in a way that has not existed before and has made it clear that civil rights is, at the very bottom, a moral issue.”
In what historian Carol Coburn has termed “the Selma Effect,” many sisters moved away from their historic roles in building and staffing institutions toward a more direct engagement with social justice. Individuals, religious communities, and newly formed intercommunity organizations helped reshape the Catholic response to inequality in late 20th-century America and beyond.
In bearing witness for change, Catholic sisters did more than join a march – they modeled a path forward. Their actions offered an implicit, and at times explicit, invitation for everyone – regardless of religion or nationality – to step outside their comfort zones and work for justice.
Global Legacies: Looking Beyond the Road to Selma
By the late twentieth century, Catholic sisters had emerged as key figures in a range of social justice initiatives, engaging in movements that spanned civil rights, poverty alleviation, education, healthcare, and human rights advocacy. While their commitment to these causes was rooted in long-standing Catholic teachings, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council provided renewed theological and institutional support for their activism.
Vatican II’s Impact on Women’s Religious Life
The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) marked a defining moment in the history of Catholic religious life, ushering in reforms that profoundly altered the role of women religious around the globe. Central to this transformation was the 1965 decree Perfectae Caritatis, which called for the renewal of religious life by urging orders to return to their foundational charisms while adapting to the needs of the modern world. Yet, this movement was not without precedent. As early as the 1950s, Pope Pius XII had encouraged the reassessment of outdated traditions, including modifications to religious dress and an expansion of educational opportunities for sisters.
Our exhibit, “Nun Dolls: Connecting Sisters Globally Through Clothing,” showed how many women religious, inspired by Vatican II’s call for aggiornamento (updating), embraced these reforms with vigor. Many orders simplified their habits or abandoned them altogether, as the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet did, signaling a shift from the more cloistered traditions of the past as defined by the medieval contemptus mundi (withdrawal from the world) toward a deeper integration with society.
More significant, however, was the theological renewal that accompanied these external changes. Sisters immersed themselves in contemporary scriptural scholarship and theology, often surpassing clergy in their understanding of the Council’s teachings.
Vatican II also reinforced the Church’s commitment to social justice – the results of which we saw first-hand in the Sisters of Selma exhibit. By 1971, a global synod of bishops had declared the pursuit of justice an essential component of the Gospel message, emboldening religious communities to engage with pressing social issues. Beginning with the March on Selma, many Catholic sisters took up the call to become active participants in movements for peace, human dignity, and economic equality, seeing their mission as one deeply intertwined with the struggles of the poor and marginalized. Documents such as Gaudium et Spes provided the theological framework for this engagement, transforming many women religious into what some described as “sister-scholar-activists,” those who combined faith with intellectual rigor to address the challenges of their time.
This exhibit highlighted the activities and experiences of St. Louis sisters in the Selma Marches, among them Sister Mary Antona Ebo, a Franciscan Sister of Mary and the only Black Catholic nun present. Her presence underscored the broader engagement of women religious in the struggle for racial justice. Declaring that she marched “for the right of people as God’s children to walk the earth in dignity,” Sister Ebo exemplified the moral conviction that guided many sisters in their activism.
Civil Rights and Economic Justice
Beyond public demonstrations, Catholic sisters worked to desegregate schools, hospitals, and other institutions under their jurisdiction. See our forthcoming exhibit, “Segregation, Desegregation, and Global Catholicism in St. Louis,” for more details.
Since the early middle ages, charitable service to the poor had been a defining feature of women’s religious life. However, in the 1960s, Catholic sisters shifted their attention toward addressing the systemic causes of poverty, rather than just alleviating its effects. Many sisters left traditional convent settings to live among the economically disadvantaged, which fostered relationships built on solidarity and direct engagement between sisters and those they served. Across the United States, women religious opened job training programs, legal clinics, and credit unions, recognizing that long-term change required economic empowerment rather than temporary relief. They built urban ministry centers, shelters, and food programs in underserved neighborhoods. One notable example is the work of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Los Angeles, who, inspired by the conciliar call to renewal, established St. Joseph’s Center in Venice, California, in the 1970s. The center offered critical support services for the homeless and economically disadvantaged. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Rochester became key allies in inner-city schools, supporting Black students and communities long marginalized by systemic discrimination.
Even the most contemplative of orders could not remain untouched by the Church’s encounter with the modern world. The exhibit, “Charting the Global Mobility of Catholic Sisters,” introduced the Sisters of the Visitation as an order that initially sought to live uncloistered, but due to episcopal opposition, was obliged to adopt the established model of women’s monasticism, one defined by interiority: humility, prayer, and the quiet virtues of the cloister. Nowhere was Visitation’s quiet transformation in the second half of the twentieth century more visible than in Minneapolis. There, in 1989, a group of Visitation Sisters established an urban monastery not in the traditional sense, but as a community of presence in a neighborhood marked by poverty and violence. Living in small homes, they made themselves part of the community – not as missionaries, but as neighbors. They hosted nonviolence workshops, offered prayer support for local activists, and extended hospitality to anyone seeking peace, rest, or spiritual counsel. It was, in its own way, a radical act: a contemplative life lived on the streets. The cloister, while still respected, no longer defined the boundaries of their mission.
Similar initiatives emerged internationally.
In Canada, sisters expanded their outreach to include Indigenous communities, focusing on reconciliation, education, and social welfare. They participated in both religious and secular initiatives aimed at addressing structural inequalities and fostering communal well-being.
The Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa, expanded their reach dramatically in the decades following Vatican II, caring for the destitute in India and beyond. In Bangladesh and Bolivia, sisters launched microcredit programs, while others organized agricultural cooperatives to support subsistence farmers.
Catholic sisters also took on new roles in policy advocacy. By the 1970s, organizations such as NETWORK had emerged to focus specifically on this work. Founded in December 1971 by a group of 47 Catholic sisters from across the United States, NETWORK emerged from the spirit of the Second Vatican Council and a growing call within the Church to actively pursue “Justice in the World.” The organization aimed to influence federal policies in areas such as international poverty, congressional reform, minimum wage, child care, consumer protection, the environment, farmworker rights, healthcare, opposition to the Vietnam War, prison reform, tax fairness, welfare reform, and women’s rights. Initially a network of women religious seeking to mobilize their collective voice within the political sphere, NETWORK expanded to include thousands of women and men from all walks of life who shared their vision.
During the civil war in El Salvador (1980-1992), sisters and lay collaborators often worked in areas ravaged by political violence. Their ministry placed them in direct conflict with state and paramilitary forces. The December 1980 martyrdom of two Maryknoll Sisters, Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, along with Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan, remains one of the most searing examples of the cost of this new approach to service. These women, inspired by Archbishop Óscar Romero, chose not only to serve the material needs of the poor but also to stand against the structures that perpetuated their suffering.
Throughout Latin America, convents were transformed into spaces of refuge, education, and advocacy. In Chile, sisters denounced the atrocities of the authoritarian Pinochet regime (1973-1990), while in Nicaragua, Maryknoll missionaries and others provided aid to civilians displaced by the Contra War (1979–1990). Often working without institutional protection and under constant surveillance, women religious became a critical presence in movements for human rights, land reform, and the defense of indigenous communities.
Their contribution did not go unnoticed. In time, their work would be echoed in the vision articulated by Pope Francis (2013-present), himself a Latin American from Argentina, who has called for a “Church that is poor and for the poor.” The legacy of women religious helped to shape this vision and through their ministries, they redefined what it meant to serve the Church in turbulent times, becoming not only caretakers, but defenders of justice and peace.
In 2008, the Society of the Sacred Heart formally adopted “Justice, Peace, and Integrity of Creation (JPIC)” as a guiding framework for all provinces worldwide. This orientation was not a departure from the Society’s spiritual foundations, but a deepening of its call to “discover and reveal God’s love in the heart of the world.” The JPIC framework challenged sisters and their collaborators to consider how structures of injustice – economic, racial, ecological – must be met not only with charity, but with systemic critique and sustained action. In the United States & Canada Province, this translated into public stances against racism, immigration injustice, and environmental degradation. Sacred Heart sisters joined advocacy efforts for immigration reform, worked alongside Indigenous communities for land justice, and launched educational initiatives on anti-racism and white privilege within their own schools and institutions (including initiatives to acknowledge and support research on their history of slaveholding). This internal work was paired with bold public witness just like the Sisters of Selma did in 1965. More recently, Sacred Heart sisters have participated in climate marches, organized against the death penalty, and stood with marginalized communities in the wake of violence and injustice. Globally, JPIC commitments took root in diverse ways: in the Philippines, Sacred Heart sisters partnered with peasant and labor movements to resist land dispossession. In Uganda, they supported survivors of gender-based violence and offered trauma-informed educational programs for children in conflict zones. In Latin America, they engaged with liberation theology and forged partnerships with grassroots organizers to address economic inequality and political repression.
In these efforts, the Society of the Sacred Heart echoed the broader transformation that animated the lives of the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Sisters of the Visitation, and other congregations of Catholic sisters in the post-Vatican II world.
As the Sisters of Selma showed us, bearing witness to justice is not a break from tradition – it is a return to its deepest roots.