Will you be able to see ‘Interrupted Lives’? Depends on your local station

For more information on the Interfaith Broadcasting Coalition and its programs, go to:
www.interfaithbroadcasting.com

The hourlong documentary “Interrupted Lives: Catholic Sisters Under European Communism” is scheduled to be offered by ABC Television on Sept. 13.

But whether you’ll actually be able to see it on your local ABC channel hinges on the verb “offered.”

Under a 30-year-old agreement between the three major American television networks and a group of faith organizations, religious programming is regularly created and then distributed nationwide.

Here’s how it works:

The Interfaith Broadcasting Coalition was formed in 1980 to provide ABC, CBS and NBC with religious programming.
The five members of the IBC are the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Council of Churches, the Islamic Society of North America, the New York Board of Rabbis and the Union for Reform Judaism.

About 100 million people in the United State attend churches, synagogues and mosques represented by those organizations.

Each year the members of the IBC have the opportunity to help produce documentaries and liturgical programs that are then provided to the network partners.

 ABC’s “Visions & Values” series gives the IBC four one-hour time slots.
NBC’s “Horizons of the Spirit” also provides four hours.
CBS produces the half-hour “Religion & Culture” documentary series four times a year in collaboration with the IBC.

Each network then offers the IBC programs to all of its affiliates by satellite. But each local station makes its own decision about whether to air a program, and when to air it.

As an example, “Native Nations: Standing Together for Civil Rights” is an IBC program offered by NBC in June. As of the end of June, it had been aired once in Kansas (by NBC-affiliate KSNT in Topeka) and had not been shown at all by any of the 25 local NBC stations in Nebraska, Missouri, Colorado, Iowa or Illinois.

A search of both the NBC and KSNT web sites for “Native Nations” turns up nothing, so there’s no way to tell if it will be aired again.

For the fall of 2009, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is providing “Interrupted Lives” to ABC as one of the “Vision & Values” hours. The IBC web site lists the documentary as being offered on Sept. 13, but there is no corresponding “Vision & Values” section on the ABC-TV web site.

Local ABC stations will make the decision whether to air it.

Viewers can contact the local network affiliate to ask that it be aired, and can check the IBC web site for other upcoming programs.

Documentary to be offered by ABC this fall

The award-winning writer and producer who is the creative force behind the upcoming documentary “Interrupted Lives: Catholic Sisters Under European Communism” says “no project has influenced me more deeply and personally.”


But Judy Zielinksi, who is a Sister of St. Francis of Sylvania, Ohio, knows she could not have had that experience without the 16 years of dedication and extensive research done by Mary Savoie and Margaret Nacke, both Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia.



Sisters Mary and Margaret first went to Romania in 1993, as volunteers to help the Church in Eastern Europe after the fall of communision.Over the next decade in many visits, they branched out to other Eastern European countries and built relationships with may of the Sisters who had survived behind the Iron Curtain.


In 2003, Sisters Mary and Margaret began serious research into the plight of those Catholic Sisters, eventually covering eight countries and the years spanning the rise of Stalin in Russia to the fall of the Berlin Wall.


That included numerous trips to Eastern Europe, interviews with the women they came to call “Sister Survivors” and extensive academic
study into the local and Church history.


In July 2006, they planned and facilitated a conference in Lviv, Ukraine, bringing together sisters from eight former communist countries. The goal was to examine fundamental values guiding those Sisters who survived under communism and to explore ways those values can be integrated into the lives of American Sisters.
As a result of the work done by Sisters Mary and Margaret, hundreds of testimonies, photographs, books and other documents have been collected and archived at Catholic Theological Union’s Bechtold Library in Chicago.
It was also in 2006 that Sisters Mary and Margaret hired NewGroup Media of South Bend, Ind. — which is where Sister Judy Zielinksi works as a writer and producer — to create a documentary of the story of the Sister Survivors.
“I wasn’t convinced at first,” Sister Judy concedes. But she made the trip to Belleville, Kan., where Sisters Mary and Margaret live and work, and spent two days talking with them and going through their materials.
“They had a huge amount of information, but they didn’t have what’s needed for TV,” recalls Sister Judy, whose credits include the documentary “Jesus Decoded.” “So that’s where my work started.”
A team from NewGroup, including Sister Judy and photographer Lynn King, and Sisters Mary and Margaret traveled together to Eastern Europe, mostly for introductions and to get a better sense of the story.
But once she began meeting the Sisters who had survived, Sister Judy realized this was more than just a scouting trip.
“These were women who were fragile, many of whom were mature women at the end of World War II,” she said. “They were elderly, and many were in frail health. We knew this couldn’t wait.”
During that first trip, they interviewed and videotaped 42 Sister Survivors. They would eventually return for more interviews and taping.
“They recalled their personal experiences of… spending years of labor on collective farms and in state-run factories, foregoing the wearing of their habits and veils, losing the right of free assembly and … banishment from monasteries and convents. Some shared stories of imprisonment, beatings and isolation. Others recalled vows whispered in confessionals, attics or basements out of fear of discovery by the police…”
For Sister Judy, who grew up in a Polish-American parish, the stories they told from the mid 1960s on were particularly moving.
“I was a young Sister teaching high school and coaching cheerleaders, experiencing a new and exciting post-Vatican II time in the Church,” she said, “and their entire culture of religious life and ministry had been destroyed, leaving only tiny remnants of debris floating around. It was sobering.”
It was also a massive creative challenge.
“The scope of this project was daunting,” Sister Judy concedes. “Tell the stories of the Communist experience over 40 years as it unfolded in five Eastern European countries, each with its own culture, history, ethnic populations and languages. And do it in 53 minutes!”
That is expected to be the finished length of the documentary when the final cut is completed.
A couple of hurdles have yet to be crossed, but the expectation is that the film will be offered by ABC television to its affiliates beginning Sept. 13.
Local ABC affiliates then can choose to air it, but have no obligation to do so. (See related story at the bottow of page 6.)
But that won’t be the end of the story — or of the work being done by Sisters Mary and Margaret, who are the executive producers of the documentary.
The DVD of “Interrupted Lives” will be available for sale through the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Sisters Mary and Margaret are organizing special showings and discussions to continue to educate people about this period of history.
One such is a colloquium scheduled for Sept 4 and 5 in Atchison.
Information about “Sister Survivors,” including “Faces of Faith” — a traveling exhibit of photographs — is available on the Sisters of St. Joseph web site:

csjkansas.org/faith-works1/

New documentary airs for first time

Before the first-ever screening of “Interrupted Lives” Monday evening, Sister Mary Savoie asked her audience to watch the so-called rough cut of the one-hour documentary with a couple of thoughts in mind:

“There’s a lot of information in this one hour,” she told the 60 or so sisters gathered in the auditorium of the Motherhouse, “but what we want you to focus on is what inspires you… Not just information but inspiration.”

The question she urged her fellow Sisters of St. Joseph to consider was this: “What seed allowed these women to persevere?”

It’s clearly a question that has driven Sister Mary and her partner, Sister Margaret Nacke, in the early six years they have devoted to meeting sisters in eight countries in Eastern Europe and researching the impact of Eastern European communism on those women as individuals and on their religious orders. Ultimately, it has been the question that led to the collaboration with NewGroup Media and the development of the documentary, which was aired for the first time Monday night.

The next step will be to send a version of the film, produced by NewGroup Media of South Bend, Ind., to the Catholic Communication Campaign of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for its OK. The USCCB donated $185,000 of the $350,000 Sisters Mary and Margaret said they needed to raise for the documentary.

After that, they will work to finalize a tentative agreement they have with ABC Television to air the documentary this fall. Their hope is to also produce a study guide to accompany the film, and a web site to complement is already in the works.

The sisters at Monday night’s screening clearly found the work worthwhile as they struggled with the answer to Sister Mary’s question.

The film covers the era from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and spans Eastern Europe from Lithuania to Slovakia and the Ukraine. The story is told in relatively straightforward historical terms, interspersed with the horrific personal stories of religious women who survived it.

Through their stories, with explanation from the narrator, viewers learn there was not a single universal experience for religious women in that time and place; while all sisters were oppressed under the governmental atheism of the Soviet Union, the degrees of that oppression varied from country to country. Some orders were disbanded and the sisters displaced or assigned to what became known as “concentration convents,” while other sisters were imprisoned, tortured and even killed for refusing to forsake their beliefs.

“I am ashamed of every complaint I’ve ever had,” said one of the older Sisters of St. Joseph at the end of Monday night’s showing. “We are asked to give so little,” said another, “and they were asked to give so much.”

For more on the work of Sisters Mary Savoie and Margaret Nacke, go to http://tinyurl.com/sistersproject

To meet some of the Eastern European sisters, go to http://tinyurl.com/facesoffaith

Sister Survivors of European Communism

The 40-plus year silence and oppression of sisters under European communism is slowly becoming known through a research project, Sister Survivors of European Communism.

Initiated in 2003 by Sisters of St. Joseph Margaret Nacke and Mary Savoie, who volunteered in Romania after the fall of communism, hundreds of testimonies, photographs, books, and other documents have been collected and archived at Catholic Theological Union’s Bechtold Library in Chicago.

Preserving the stories of the extraordinary courage and unwavering commitment of these sisters is important historical data for the archives of the Catholic church.  Every effort was made by the Soviet communists and their satellite countries to suppress all activities of the sisters, depriving them of ministries that would in any way influence others and placing them in works that would negate any contact; therefore, whether on farms, in factories, caring for the elderly or incarcerated in prisons, sisters seemed undeterred in living their faith.

Aware of the urgency of interviewing many of the sisters because of age, the authors of this project worked with major superiors in the eight countries of focus to collect data.  The project has taken various paths since its inception; for example, a PowerPoint presentation titled “Witnesses to Faith” offers a background of historical information, specific photographs of sisters with their testimonies, and a variety of situations of sisters during this period.  “Faces of Faith” is a traveling exhibit of sixteen 11 x 20 inch photographs of sisters with information about their lives under communism.  In 2006, Sisters Margaret and Mary — in collaboration with the Ukrainian Catholic University’s Institute of Church History — presented a conference in Lviv, Ukraine, with the theme “Our Common Mission and Commitment: Lessons from Sister Survivors of European Communism.”

THE CONFERENCE

Sisters Margaret and Mary in July 2006 planned and facilitated a conference in Lviv, Ukraine. The conference was held at Holy Spirit Seminary and brought together sisters from eight former communist countries.  The goal of this conference was to examine fundamental values guiding sisters who lived under communism and to explore ways in which these values can be integrated into our lives as sisters.

The Rev. Dr. Borys Gudziak, Rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv, in his opening address focused his remarks on the history of the persecuted Greek Catholic Church, how that history has been recorded and his personal thoughts and hypothesis about female religious relative to the underground church.  Dr. Gemma Simmonds, Congregation of Jesus, lecturer in Theology, Heythrop College, University of London, gave the major presentations.  Her remarks anchored the universal relevancy and value of the work of the conference for the church and especially for women religious.

Some of the lessons expressed by conference participants as they reflected on the lives of those who experienced communism:

• Human life is characterized by conflict and tragedy; however, through the witness of faith our lives can become a revelation, not of the hopelessness of the human condition, but of the hope that is to be uncovered in tragedy.

• We need to examine our current religious lives, not only as affected by our past, but more importantly in light of today’s church and social realities.

• The hardships of the past were clear and we endured them.  We are now experiencing the slavery of freedom.

• We are called, as T.S. Eliot said, to a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything.

THE DOCUMENTARY

A recent initiative is the production of a one-hour broadcast documentary, “Interrupted Lives — Catholic Sisters Under European Communism,” that will reach a broad audience in this country and abroad.  Expected to be completed by April 2009, the documentary will include reflections from Eastern European historians, re-enactments of life in prison and escape, and on-site interviews to bring to life the story of Sister Survivors.

The Sister Survivors project is an example of international cross-border collaboration among congregations of women religious who lived under communism.  Although the project reveals the over 40-year oppression of sisters in some Central and Eastern European countries, directors are aware that substantial research remains to expand learning about the oppression of sisters under European communism but also in other parts of the world.

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