The 13th triennial meeting of the Conference on the History of Women Religious focused on lives and archives, including the daunting race against time to save collections at risk of being lost.
Mary B. Carney’s path to the Conference on the History of Women Religious (CHWR) began in 2018—although she didn’t know it at the time. Carney, an associate professor emerita of social work at SUNY Fredonia, had been working on her family tree when she came across some articles on newspapers.com that seemed to be about her great-granduncle, Patrick Keiran. Carney wasn’t sure, though, because she couldn’t remember family members ever talking about the story these articles told. One subtitle on the front page of the Buffalo Courier from December 1908 read: “Unaccountable Absence of Kieran [sic] and Missing Account Books Lead to Tangle in Settlement of Affairs of Fidelity Funding Company; Many Priests and Nuns Among Heaviest Losers.” Additional digging confirmed to Carney that this was indeed her great-granduncle—and it sent her on a hunt to learn more.
Keiran, it turned out, had used fraudulent promissory notes to con more than 50 Catholic individuals and organizations, including convents, schools, and congregations, out of an estimated $4.5 million. As the extent of his scam became clear, Keiran vanished. He turned up two months later for the court case and ended up receiving barely a slap on the wrist.
Even as Carney consulted institutional documents and insurance magazines of the era to piece together exactly what had happened, she had lingering questions. How could he have been so convincing? What was the real impact of his actions on his victims? In 2019 she contacted several of his hardest hit clients, including the Benedictine Sisters at St. Mary’s Monastery, Rock Island, Illinois (formerly of Nauvoo, Illinois), the Visitation Sisters of Rock Island, the Mercy Sisters of Buffalo, and the Vincentians, to see what she could glean from their archives.
That outreach opened the door for Carney to get many of her questions answered and for the communities to learn about the financial crises their forebears endured over a century earlier. At the end of her initial visit to the Benedictine archives, Carney presented her findings to the community and shared that this wasn’t just an isolated drama within their religious community and her family tree: The Fidelity Funding Company’s fraud was part of a series of questionable and unethical financial transactions that spurred the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Indeed, these stories belonged to the history of white-collar crime and bankruptcy in the United States.
In her CHWR presentation, “Holding Family Secrets: Archives Reveal the Fidelity Funding Company’s Activities and Impact,” Carney said that her experience in the archives and the relationships that have sprung out of her research visits have been life changing. The hospitality she received and the opportunity to help elucidate a long-lost part of their shared history left a deep impression. “The questions the archivists ask in relation to what I’m finding open doors [to things] that they know that I don’t know,” she said. “I find more information and can concentrate better at an archive.”
Carney’s story is one of many that were shared at the 13th triennial meeting of the Conference on the History of Women Religious, held June 22–25, 2025, at the University of Notre Dame, and her story captures both aspects of the conference theme, “Lives and Archives.”
Nearly 200 participants from 14 countries on five continents attended the conference, which was sponsored by the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism and cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Spirituality at Saint Mary’s College. The schedule included 30 panel sessions with more than 100 presenters, as well as a keynote address by Katharine Massam (University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia) titled “Rewilding Authority: Catholic Women Religious in Synodal Times,” a work-in-progress screening of You Should Never Blink, a documentary film about artist Corita Kent by Jillian Schultz and Leah Thompson, and an awards banquet address by Sister Simone Campbell, S.S.S., former executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice.
The “Lives and Archives” theme guided the program, giving equal consideration to recent scholarship on individuals and groups and to the current realities of archives of women religious, particularly the daunting race against time to safeguard archives of religious communities that are in decline. A handful of presentations addressed new horizons in the field and virtuous practices that enrich research and archival endeavors. The conference awards banquet celebrated the work of four honorees for their significant achievements in the field.
Lively lives
In the Monday morning panel “How Scholars Narrate the Lives of Women Religious: Methods and Ethics,” Carol K. Coburn (Avila University) recapped the approaches that historians have used since the mid-20th century to tell the stories of women religious, including the “great woman approach,” the “single-subject approach,” and the “add-women-and-stir approach,” and acknowledged their success in producing scholarly articles and books, institutional histories, global ministries, and film documentaries. Coburn also considered topics that have yet to be fully explored, including noncanonical communities such as IHM and Glenmary, Catholic sisters’ organizations, sisters in small town and rural ministries, social justice networks, and print and digital media. Coburn said that CHWR as an organization remains as vital and as valuable now as it’s ever been in its 37-year history and that its work must continue. “Progress and survival are never guaranteed,” she said. “Things can be taken away. We have more work to do and more ways to do it than ever.”
One thing that can always be taken away is an accurate account of events. In a joint presentation, Arlene Bachanov (Adrian Dominican Sisters) and Sister Mary Navarre, O.P. (Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids) recounted how they worked together to determine what was really behind the 1894 split of the two communities’ parent order and how that split strained relations between the two Dominican groups for decades. Their collaboration, encouraged by the prioresses of the two communities, cut through old misunderstandings and yielded a more accurate account of their shared history.
While most of the conference presentations focused on people and events from the 19th and 20th centuries, presenters drew on topics from around the globe dating back to the 16th century. The sessions included stories of individuals such as Blessed Maria Theresia Bonzel, founder the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration (Sister Mary Martha N. Fe, O.S.F., University of San Carlos), Sister Mary Paul Watts, a 20th-century American who joined the Sisters of Our Lady of China (Chia-An [Victor] Tung, University of Toronto), and Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo, a 17th-century Italian playwright and educator (Jennifer Haraguchi, Brigham Young University), as well as stories of groups such as the Indigenous sisters (Ammagarulu) of the Congregation of Jesus Mary Joseph in India (Sister Lilly Antony, KU Leuven), Catholic women religious in Norway under the German occupation (Else-Britt Nilsen, O.P., University of Oslo), and Lakota Catholic sisters (William Critchley-Menor, S.J., Boston College). Presentations highlighted sisters’ contributions in education, health care, the arts, and humanitarian efforts, as well as their involvement in abuse in religious life (Mary Dispenza, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) and their place in archives pertaining to abuse (Terence McKiernan, BishopAccountability.org).
Archives in transition
The sessions on archives provided a temperature check of the institutions that researchers rely on and offered conference attendees a behind-the-scenes view of some of the day-to-day work in archives as well as the difficulties that archives face.
Casey Bowser (Seton Hill University) urged her audience to think of a religious community’s archives as part of its legacy and mission. Her presentation, “Opportunity in the Flux: Archives of Women Religious in Transition,” recommended actions that researchers can take to successfully foster collaboration with archivists, especially in archives that are “in transition”—those that are starting to wind down permanently or to move their collection to a new location. These actions include:
· having a clear research topic and a description of anticipated outcomes, including how this project might help the archives
· managing expectations about digitization requests and recognizing that digitization is often low on the to-do list of archivists who are busy with transition tasks
· scheduling time to get in the archives (archivists know that the best discoveries and connections are the ones that researchers find themselves)
· being prepared, understanding, and supportive of archivists, recognizing that many are stretched very thin
Kathleen Washy (Sisters of St. Joseph of Baden) recounted the grassroots work of archivists in Western Pennsylvania to establish a network and regional directory of Catholic archives, while Peggy M. Delmas (University of South Alabama) offered some refreshers to fellow researchers on how to approach archives, and archivist Jennifer Meacham (Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Monroe, Michigan) explained her practice of interviewing researchers who contact her in search of material. Meacham asks them what they know about the topic already and what they think they need, tells them what she wants them to know about her archives’ holdings, and determines if they even need an in-person visit. Meacham also reminded her audience of one tactic researchers should always deploy: “Courtesy goes a long way,” she said.
Race against time
If conference participants weren’t already familiar with the phrase “communities coming to completion,” they became well acquainted with it during this triennial meeting.
Veronica Buchanan (Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati) presented findings from a 2022 CARA survey about the current state of women religious archives, including the finding that nearly 40 percent of respondents expect to transition their archive within 10 years. (Just 19.5 percent of respondents indicated that they expect their archive to survive more than 10 years in its current state, and 41 percent did not answer the question.) Thirty-two percent of respondents said they had a long-term plan to deal with their archive, but over 47 percent did not. Additionally, respondents gave the average age of their membership; nearly 45 percent had an average age of 80 or above, and just under 20 percent had an average age of below 70.
Like Buchanan, Bowser also cited troubling results from the CARA survey: While 86 percent of surveyed communities have an archive, only 57 percent make it available for public research, and fewer than 20 percent use a collections management system (CMS) to handle collections and create finding aids. Many rely on part-time staff or volunteers.
‘Many religious communities are making hard decisions about properties or ministries . . . This crisis is unprecedented in the archival field.’
— Casey Bowser
Her presentation included a slide that read, “The vast majority of communities (think 80%) will ‘come to completion’ in the next 10–20 years.” She said that while a religious community’s archive should be a key part of its legacy, they are frequently forgotten. “Many religious communities are making hard decisions about properties or ministries,” Bowser said, “but the future of archives is not necessarily a priority.”
It remains uncertain what will happen to the collections in these archives. “This crisis is unprecedented in the archival field,” she said, and she encourages communities coming to completion to stay clear eyed and get to work.
The Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious (ACWR) developed the “Religious Archives in Transition Toolkit” as a response to the CARA findings. The 153-page guide, referenced frequently throughout the conference, includes checklists, resources, and guides on tasks like how to conduct a records inventory and how to deaccession collections. (The toolkit is available for download at archivistsacwr.org/transitioning-archives.)
“This is a heavy burden, professionally and emotionally,” Bowser said. “Many lay archivists are working themselves out of a job by preparing archives to move to another facility, and many sister-archivists are experiencing an incalculable emotional toll as communities come to completion.”
The looming challenges of this time also include lost institutional memory and “blackout periods” when collections will be inaccessible due to processing. “Imagine sending your family archive to another family,” Bowser said. “Who will care about it? Will the stories remain? Will there be an understanding of your family’s legacy? The reality is, not all archives will be saved, and not all stories will be preserved. The history of women religious, drawn from photographs, letters, meeting minutes, paintings, habits, oral histories, and more, is at risk of loss.”
Despite these real threats, there are glimmers of hope. Jennifer Head (Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary) provided updates on five collaborative archives that are in the process of being established: Women in the Catholic Church and Theology Archives at Santa Clara University; the Heritage and Research Center at Saint Mary’s (HARC, Notre Dame, Indiana); the Catholic Religious Archives at Boston College (CRA); the Women Religious Archives Collaborative (WRAC, Cleveland); and the Franciscan Central Archive (FCA; Frankfort, Illinois). Together, these new facilities already are set to house the archives of over 100 religious communities, and they have the capacity for more. Kristien Suenens (KU Leuven) presented on a similar type of facility in Belgium: KADOC, the Interfaculty Documentation and Research Centre on Religion, Culture and Society at KU Leuven, which was established in 1976 and holds the archives of approximately 100 religious congregations.
New horizons
Professional genealogist and independent researcher Sunny Jane Morton came to the meeting with a problem and a proposal. The problem is that Catholic sisters are often left off of family trees; she has found that just 20 percent are on their family trees with complete information, while 40 percent are “dangling” with partial information, and 40 percent are left off their family trees completely. Sisters are a challenge for genealogists, Morton said, because they don’t leave descendants and don’t memorialize themselves. Often they also change their name, disappear from public records, and relocate along unpredictable migration paths. “This means their legacy of faith and service is lost to those to whom it would mean the most,” Morton said. She said that an estimated 350,000 women have been Catholic nuns in the United States. To keep them visible for genealogists and researchers, Morton proposed a database of Catholic sisters, “Ancestry.nun,” that would include their baptismal name, religious name, profession dates, locations of ministry, death date, and additional information that would be valuable to family members and researchers. Morton referred to three existing databases—Who Were the Nuns?, a database containing details of nearly 4,000 women in English convents from 1600 to 1800; the 10 Million Names project, a work-in-progress database identifying enslaved people of African descent in the United States and its preceding colonies between the 1500s and 1865; and Homestead Hebrews, a project documenting the 20th-century Jewish community in Homestead, Pennsylvania. These three websites provide models of how to uncover and organize information about a large group of people. Already 250 convent burial grounds in the United States are searchable on FindaGrave.com, totaling approximately 55,000 women religious. This existing collection could kick-start her envisioned project, Morton said.
As exemplified by Mary B. Carney’s presentation, family stories and congregational stories sometimes fit into bigger stories. Monica L. Mercado (Colgate University) and other presenters acknowledged that while a religious community’s archive is certainly valuable for the information and stories it contains about the sisters, some researchers may be more interested in the people the sisters worked with—students, women, immigrants, Indigenous peoples, or other under-documented people. These materials, though they may not take center stage in a particular religious community’s archive, can be especially valuable in understanding individuals or groups that are hard to find elsewhere. On the flip side, Patrick Hayes (Baltimore Province of the Redemptorists) said that sometimes archives not belonging to communities of women religious have significant holdings of interest for researchers of women religious, and these resources shouldn’t be overlooked.
Virtuous practices for research
By asking open-ended questions, researchers and archivists can build trust with each other, leading to a more rewarding and successful encounter for both.
While some sessions addressed the mechanics of archival research, a few papers touched on higher-level practices that enhance the research process, both in the archives and in the field. In her paper, “Negotiating Tension, Building Trust: Archival Research on Women Religious,” Barbara Wolf Shousha (University of Nebraska) presented her findings from interviewing archivists about the role of trust in the researcher-archivist relationship. By openly sharing research plans, archive policies, other guiding documents and concerns with each other and by asking open-ended questions such as “Can you say more?” and “What else should I be asking?” researchers and archivists can build trust with each other, leading to a more rewarding and successful encounter for both. Shousha encouraged her audience members to examine their biases and assumptions about archives and archivists, as well as sisters, researchers, journalists and genealogists. Her final slide included a quote from scripture: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34).
It was not the only place that the topic of love was considered. In “Love as Object and Method of Ethnographic Research among Catholic Sisters,” Samuel Huard (University of Toronto) offered his reflection on the role that friendship and care played in his ethnographic study of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame (CND Sisters) in Quebec and Honduras, and how investing time and dedication, as well as having a loving orientation and disposition, is required for good ethical relationships with research partners. “Involvement with care changes our experience,” Huard said. Part of his inspiration came from his subjects themselves, whose spirituality of Visitation and Pentecost encourages going toward and being visited, “so that each encounter can be transformative,” he said. “It requires writing with an openness to future encounters. It shouldn’t be the
final word.”
Celebrating the work
On Tuesday night, June 24, conference participants gathered at a banquet to honor outstanding work in the field and to hear remarks from Sister Simone Campbell, S.S.S.
The conference bestowed four awards: Tim Allender (University of Sydney) received the Distinguished Book Award for Empire Religiosity: Convent habits in colonial and postcolonial India (Manchester University Press, 2024); Deirdre Raftery (University College Dublin) received the Distinguished Book Award for Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World: A Transnational History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); Kathleen Sprows Cummings (University of Notre Dame) received the Distinguished Scholar Award for her research, writing, teaching, speaking, and her work as coordinator of CHWR from 2013 to 2023; and Sister Dolores Liptak, R.S.M. (Holy Apostles College and Seminary, emeritus, in absentia) received the Lifetime Achievement Award. Liptak’s award citation highlighted her pioneering advocacy for professionalizing convent archives, her initiation of numerous local preservation projects, and her role in establishing Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious, serving as its inaugural president and completing three terms in its first decade. Liptak was also active in CHWR from the beginning, presenting research or facilitating sessions at eight of its first nine triennial meetings.
During the banquet, a slide show of images from past triennial meetings played, calling to mind many past participants. One in particular, Sister Karen Kennelly, C.S.J., was especially missed at this meeting, the first CHWR gathering since her death in 2023. Kennelly was an original organizer of CHWR as well as a longtime coordinator of the organization and editor of its newsletter. She received CHWR’s Distinguished Historian Award in 1995 and its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016.
In her talk, “The Past as Prologue: History Enriching the Call of the Spirit Today,” Campbell shared stories of her own life and work, including the creation of the original Nuns on the Bus tour for economic justice in 2012. She spoke of how her foremothers in the Sisters of Social Service were models for how to respond to fear, injustice, and oppression, and how they helped put her on her life’s path. She also reflected on what she had heard at the conference—on how sisters throughout history dealt with adversity by persevering, listening to the Spirit, and acting in response to the Spirit. “I want to lift up the fact that what you study really is about the movement of the Holy Spirit in the history of women religious. Because we are not about power, usually, or about being the men in control who get to speak the really powerful final word. We’re the ones that get to do the work. And that is the actual final word.”
Heather Grennan Gary is a writer and editor based in Hillsdale, Michigan. She worked as the Cushwa Center’s communications and outreach specialist from 2012 to 2016.
This article appears in the fall 2025 issue of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.