I have never been interested in Catholicism or nunneries but I was intrigued by a recent prize-winning book Unconventional Women: The story of the last Blessed Sacrament Sisters in Australia by Sarah Gilbert (Melbourne University Press, 2024).

The Servants of the Blessed Sacrament was established in nineteenth-century France and a small group of Sisters arrived to form a convent in Melbourne in the 1950s. The Sisters were an enclosed order of contemplative nuns that wore the full habit and veil, and were almost entirely shut off from the outside world. Their calling was to observe continuous 24 hour adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in their chapel. Whilst the chapel was open to the public for mass the nuns were invisible behind a screen. They only ventured outside the convent for emergencies or appointments with doctors or dentists. Visitors and other contacts, even friends and family, were very limited.

The founding sisters were joined by Australian converts and for many years they earned their living by making the altar bread for all the Catholic churches in Melbourne – a task that grew to become quite a burden.

In 1966 Pope Paul VI decreed that the Catholic church should follow the recommendations of the Second Vatican Council in the previous year to open up to the outside world. But the recommendations threatened the strict authoritarian nature of the convent and the nuns weren’t told of the instructions until much later. However, over the following years several of the nuns did go out into the outside world, joining other convents. Some did remarkable work in Redfern in Sydney among First Nations peoples and others. Eventually the convent was closed in the early 2000s.

The author, Sarah Gilbert is a journalist, historian and documentary maker who had a Catholic education but has never been a nun. She was invited to produce the book by a group of former nuns and was able to interview six of them and had access to some diaries and letters of those and others.

She begins with a short history of the role of nuns in the Catholic church to the present day, pointing out that:

Convents were, from the Middle Ages, important centres of female creativity and intellectual labour. Scholars now believe that convents across Europe and its dominions housed some of the artists, writers and scribes who were responsible for a large but unknowable portion of the Middle Ages’ anonymous works of literature, including the detailed illustrated manuscripts that circulated during that time, and which convents produced as a source of income.

She also mentions that until the 1970s nuns in Australia “vastly outnumbered the priests, brothers, monks and bishops who made up the overwhelmingly male face of the Church (and still do).”

The book is an interesting history of some ‘unconventional women’ who did remarkable work for the general community in the 20^th century. I borrowed my copy from the Brisbane City Council Library (and there was a long waiting list!).