Inserted Communities as Places of Encounter in Post-Conciliar Britain, 1970s-2000s

Catholic religious institutes of sisters and nuns were influenced by the Second Vatican Council’s (1962-1965) call to the renewal of religious life. This paper examines the changing ministries of Catholic sisters as they rethought forms of outreach from education, nursing and social welfare to those that emphasized social justice. It examines the religious meaning of their commitment to those on the margins of society within the context of British religious institutes diminishing in size and within the new paradigm of de-institutionalised forms of ministry. This paper will address the experimental ministry of ‘inserted communities’, small communities that placed themselves within the heart of inner-city neighbourhoods and those on the margins of society.  Archival material and oral testimony will be examined to identify the complex lived experience of religious sisters in the inner-city mission, how they grappled with tensions of ‘being with’ and ‘doing for’.

Carmen M. Mangion teaches modern British history at Birkbeck University of London. Her research examines the cultural and social history of gender and religion in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain relating to how religious identities were formed, imagined and lived during times of social change.  Her most recent monograph, Catholic nuns and sisters in a secular age, Britain 1945-1990 (2020), draws on archival materials and a remarkable set of eighty interviews to place Catholic sisters and nuns at the heart of the turbulent 1960s, integrating their story of social change into a larger British and international one. Her current research has two strands, the first examines religious life in the inner city after 1970. The second, interrogates the decline of the lay sister state of religious life, 1880s-1960.

In-person seminar, open to all.

 

Venue: Blackfriars Hall - St Giles Oxford, OX1 3LY United Kingdom Array ( [lat] => 51.756248 [lng] => -1.259881 )

Contact:
Las Casas Institute
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk