Religious life
An order’s memory is held by fewer people every year, and they are not being replaced.
Jubilee accounts, founding histories, oral history programmes and archive assessment for congregations of women and men religious.
“and their works do follow them.”Revelation 14:13
There is no other institution where the arithmetic is this stark. A congregation of sisters that had four hundred members in 1962 has thirty now, the median age is in the eighties, the motherhouse has been sold or is being sold, and the archive is going to a shared repository. Whatever is not written down in the next few years will not be written down.
What goes first is not the records. It is the account. The annals survive, the chapter minutes survive, the photographs survive — and none of them tell you what it was actually like to be sent, at nineteen, to a school two thousand miles from home, or what the sisters did on the ward at three in the morning, or how a community absorbed the changes of the sixties.
On the word
Strictly, nuns are contemplative and enclosed; the teaching, nursing and mission congregations most people mean are sisters, and members of an apostolic congregation will usually tell you so. I use whichever term your community uses about itself. The same care applies throughout — motherhouse, generalate, charism, formation, apostolate, completion. These are your words and they go on the page as your words.
What gets commissioned
Jubilee accounts
A golden or diamond jubilee of profession. One sister’s life written properly, read at the celebration and kept in the archive. The most frequent request, the easiest to schedule, and the one most often left a year too long.
The founding and the arrival
How the community came to this country, this diocese, this town. Usually documented in the annals in the flattest possible prose, and usually far more difficult than the annals suggest.
An apostolate written up
The hospital, the school, the orphanage, the mission, the college — what the community actually built and staffed, told by the sisters who were on the ward and in the classroom rather than from the institutional history.
An oral history programme
Every member interviewed in turn, over a year or two, written up individually and kept. This is the work that has to start now rather than after the next round of planning. I will train your own people to run it if that is cheaper, and it usually is.
Completion
A community that is completing: the last members, the disposition of the motherhouse, the transfer of the archive. The history matters more at this point, not less — it is what survives the property, and it is what the diocese and the repository will actually be able to use.
Assessment
Before commissioning anything: what is already in the archive, what condition it is in, what the cassettes from 1988 contain, and what finishing the unfinished manuscript would take. Frequently the cheapest useful thing a congregation can buy.
Brothers, monasteries and beyond Rome
The same work applies to congregations of brothers, to monastic communities, and to Anglican and Orthodox religious orders. Protestant deaconess communities and diaconal orders face an identical arithmetic and are almost entirely unwritten. If your community is small enough that you assume nobody does this kind of work for you, ask.
Where the record is difficult
This has to be said plainly, because it is the first thing a leadership team is thinking and usually the last thing anybody says out loud.
Some communities’ histories include serious harm — residential and industrial schools, orphanages, institutional care, the treatment of the children and adults who were placed in a congregation’s hands. Where that is part of the record, the writing says so. I do not write exculpation, I do not balance a survivor’s account away with context, and I do not describe a documented wrong as a misunderstanding of its era.
What I will do is write the whole thing honestly: the harm and the ordinary lives and the work that was genuinely done, none of it cancelling any of the rest. Several communities have decided that is exactly what they want and have said so in writing before we started. If your leadership wants something other than that, I am the wrong writer and I will say so on the first call rather than four months in.
Practical notes
Interviews are by secure video or in person where travel makes sense, in sittings of forty-five to ninety minutes — shorter and more frequent for members in care. Your archivist reviews every draft. Consent is obtained in writing from each sister individually, not from the leadership on her behalf, and any member may strike anything at any point including after the fact.
Copyright rests with the congregation. Costing is scaled to a community’s actual means; a thirty-member congregation is not quoted like a diocese.
Where to start
Send me 250 words about one person.
No fee, no obligation. I will shape what you send into a finished passage, return it, and tell you honestly what your material could become. If the answer is that you do not need me, I will say that too.
What it costs, and how long it takes
Every quotation is fixed in writing before anything begins. These are planning ranges so a council can discuss the shape of it before we speak.
One jubilee account
One sister, one interview of about an hour, a finished narrative of roughly 1,200 to 1,500 words, one round of corrections. Usually four to six weeks. The most common commission.
Several sisters
A small number of interviews shaped into one continuous account — a house, an apostolate, a generation. Two to four months depending on availability.
A founding or centenary history
Annals, chapter minutes, photographs and living memory worked into a single narrative. Longer, and scoped after I have seen what the archive holds.
See what each service costs Read a finished sample
For a superior or an archivist
If you need something to bring to a council or a chapter, write and say so. I will send a one-page outline of what a commission involves, what it costs, and what the community keeps — in a form you can circulate.
Where a congregation is completing, I will say honestly what can be done in the time that remains. Sometimes that is one interview, written up in a week.