A New Internationalism: Endeavouring to ‘Build from this Diversity, Unity’, 1945–90

Abstract

Catholic women’s religious institutes as religio-cultural networks crossed national borders. Often, as with religious sisters who taught and nursed, their relocation was done for the sake of evangelisation and mission. Religious life was influenced by international connections but the meaning and consequences of religious internationalism shifted and came into sharp relief from the 1940s. This article examines how one religious congregation, the Dutch Sisters of Charity of Our Lady Mother of Mercy ( Zusters van Liefde) transformed their understanding of what it meant to be an international religious congregation. It examines the changing understandings of being international through the shift from uniformity to pluriformity. This led to transnational exchanges via revised practices of governance that were both consultative and participatory and emphasised a culture of ‘communication and encounter’. Religious institutes developed new understandings of internationalism which acknowledged the national diversity of their membership but this was a difficult journey weighed down as it was by mindsets that reified convent traditions and forms of cultural superiority. New understandings of internationalism acknowledged the national diversity of their membership and worked to develop unity from cultural difference through governance and interrelationships. This case study demonstrates the complexities of the processes by which Catholic international religious institutes around the world were rethinking their internationalism in response to the social consequences of post-war modernity and later, the spirit of aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). It broadens our understanding of internationalist thoughts and actions, pointing to an emphasis on the national, which, rather than receding comes to the forefront particularly in the process of decentralisation. It also demonstrates that women without an explicitly feminist or political agenda also negotiated how internationalism was defined, lived and experienced. Internationalist activities did not occur in a vacuum, they were aligned to the larger social movements of the post-war Catholic and secular world.