Nuns Now – Soul Search interviews Sr Helen Carboon and Katharine Massam

“Nuns Now” is the focus of the latest episode of Soul Search on Radio National.

Listen to Sr Helen Carboon, congregational leader of the Presentation Sisters Victoria, and Professor Katharine Massam, of the University of Divinity, talk with Dr Meredith Lake about contemporary religious life, changes in vowed communities over the last 50 years and what Sandra Schneiders calls the ‘monastic archetype’, that dimension of religious intensity that features in human community across cultures and eras.

The program coincides with the celebrations marking 150 years since the first Presentation Sisters arrived in Melbourne from Limerick in Ireland to take up roles as teachers and administrators in Catholic schools. The outward-looking leadership of Presentation Sisters in the decades before and after the Second Vatican Council encouraged a style of theological reflection on experience that embraced possibilities for renewal.

This commitment to reflection and renewal is a key theme of Katharine Massam’s account of the vision and mission of the congregation over the last sixty years. The Promise and the Blessing, explores how the Presentation Sisters have negotiated change in their way of life, their understanding of who God is, and of how God calls them to be. The account maps the shared Presentation conversation as it moves, not uniformly but steadily, from ‘school’, through ‘ministry’, to ‘contemplative engagement’ and ‘legacy’, woven through with a stable commitment to ‘women’ and ‘family’ and the overarching Mystery of their call. Advance reviews are enthusiastic and the book is due for release later this year.

The ongoing commitment of the Presentation Sisters to education, empowerment and the unfolding of the next stages in the widest story of God’s work in the world also includes their involvement in the Australian Religious Archive which is designed to hold the story, history and legacy of religious congregations and other religious groups who have made significant contributions to both civic and church life in Australia and beyond.

Sister Helen Carboon is Congregation Leader of the Catholic Presentation Sisters of Victoria, and also Chair of the Australian Religious Archive Committee, a partnership between the University of Divinity and several religious congregations.

Professor Katharine Massam is an historian of religion at the University of Divinity, with a particular research interest in Catholic women’s spirituality. She is the author of The Promise and the Blessing: Presentation Sisters in Victoria Since Vatican II , which traces the history of this teaching congregation from 1958 to the present, with an emphasis on the way they made (and make) meaning.