The second volume of Preaching Justice offers a fascinating account of the work undertaken by congregations of Dominican sisters around the world in their fight for a more peaceful and just social order. This offers an interesting and much needed addition to volume one, which focused on the work of the friars. The overall quality and layout of the book is a great improvement on volume one, where contributions on the work of French Dominican friars had not been forthcoming, and where the quality of the chapters seemed more uneven.
The broad sweep of this volume certainly makes for fascinating reading, not just in terms of the ministries and pastoral work undertaken, but in the variety of countries and cultural contexts which the sisters find themselves in. Although the book covers work across the world, from the USA to Vietnam, Sweden to South Africa, two particular situations come to the fore, the work of sisters in Africa and the chapter on the Dominican sisters in Iraq.
The work of the sisters in Africa shows quite how unrelenting their work of preaching social justice is. In two chapters early on in the book, in the section on sisters preaching social justice, the work of the Cabra Dominican Sisters in apartheid South Africa and the Dominican Missionaries of Africa and their work in Rwanda make for an interesting juxtaposition. The Cabra sisters spent much of the apartheid period working to integrate their schools and had been instrumental in working with the bishops’ conference in the fight for equality. But just as the work of building a new and more tolerant society in post‐apartheid South Africa had begun, the genocide began in Rwanda. This was a particular challenge to the communities involved, as their congregation had only just been formed from a number of other congregations. Their strength in the face of such barbaric slaughter is truly extraordinary.
To my mind the most interesting chapter is on the history of the Dominican sisters in Iraq, beginning with the request of three women to live together as tertiaries in 1877. The congregation was recognised formally in April 1929 when the last surviving of these original three was clothed in the Dominican habit. In the intervening years, the congregation had experienced the pain and suffering brought about by the First World War, and this found exemplary witness in the courage of Sausan Kaka, the prioress of the lay community's convent in Siirt, Turkey, who was martyred in an Ottoman death march as she protected the children attending the convent school. The congregation set up houses in towns and villages now familiar to us from news reports, with one of their first foundations outside of Mosul being in the town of Qaraqosh in 1893 and Batnaya in 1907, both of which were victim of ISIS's violent campaign of terror in 2014. The sisters have spent their ministry in Iraq strengthening the voice of women in society through their network of schools, and while this chapter relates much of this history, it was, however, one of the first to be written, and so does not take into account the most recent history of the sisters in Iraq as they dealt with the devastation of Islamic fundamentalism.
But the book also offers an opportunity to reflect on the mission of the Church, and the nature of the Dominican vocation. First, the book offers us a challenge to listen once again to Pope Francis's call for the Church to travel to the margins, but, as this book shows, quite often that margin is not in the foreign mission, but among the most ignored and dispossessed in our own society. The chapters on the work of French ‘worker sisters’ and the life their foundress, Elisabeth Voisin as well as the chapter on the work of Dominican sisters in Lille in educational programmes among immigrant communities reinforce to us once again that the margin can often be much closer to us than we imagine.
The ideal that seems to run through all of the experiences of these sisters is that of community. In his foreword to the proceedings of the 2016 conference in Salamanca on Dominican contributions to the promotion and defence of human rights, the Master of the Order points to the privileged place of community in our preaching. Our communities are to show not only that human beings are capable of the intimate communion of religious life, but also that this communion requires patience. Through all of these varied experiences and apostolates, in the face of incredible danger and state opposition, these sisters have cherished the life of their community and its daily observance as something which provides them with the strength to continue in their work, but also as the very means by which they are able to show to the world the meaning of a just society where human dignity is respected.
