The 171-year story of the Delaware Valley’s own order of Franciscan sisters involves a rich history of service for God’s people living on the margins of society, despite cultural barriers.
All their work offered in Catholic fidelity and the charisms of contemplation, poverty and humility, are the subject of a new feature-length documentary film on the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia.
Sara McDermott Jain’s, “No Risk, No Gain,” tells the story of the faithfulness and impact of the sisters with a power that evokes tears as well as laughter. It could even change some people’s viewpoints of women in religious life.
The sisters screened the movie for supporters of the order’s mission March 30 at the Franciscan Spiritual Center in Aston, part of the sisters’ Our Lady of Angels Convent.
“I go back to that perception that somehow people perceive that sisters were kind of isolated, secluded, only about prayer and very serious,” said Sister Kathy Dougherty, the Vice President of Mission and Ministry at Neumann University, which the sisters founded in 1965.
“You’ll see a whole other side in this film of real life, real people, in love with God for sure, in love with God’s creation and all people, and that we’ll go where a lot of people won’t go.”
McDermott Jain and her team captured 50 interviews from among more than 250 current sisters and many others who told the story of the impact of the order. It was founded in April 1855 when St. John Neumann, then bishop of the Diocese of Philadelphia, invested three women into the new order to help Catholic immigrants to the city who were facing discrimination.
“Hearing so many of the sisters’ stories, they really blew me away. There was a lot that I didn’t know about what they had done and the kind of influence that they had actually had in the world, and it really just amazed me,” said McDermott Jain, an award-winning screenwriter, New York Times bestselling author and Neumann University adjunct professor who has documented many of the stories for the sisters’ publication Good News.
“I just thought to myself, ‘We should really be capturing these stories. This really deserves to be a film, and we really want to capture these stories in their own words while we can.”
The movie, which has also been shown at area film festivals, documents how many of the more than 4,000 sisters over 171 years often stepped into often-unprecedented leadership roles for women in business and society as part of their devotedness to God’s calling in the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi.
“When the average person thinks of a religious sister, they’re not thinking in terms of trailblazing, feminism or anything like that, but I realized that really is a big part of the story, (how) they opened things up,” said McDermott Jain.
“They were CEOs of hospitals, presidents of universities, and building amazing organizations way before any other women anywhere were able to take on those kinds of roles. It really opened things up where they could use their talent and really become leaders.”
The stories include sisters traveling across the United States with meager money in their pockets, yet opening ministries to serve those with even greater needs through 88 ministries in 19 dioceses by 1906.
They also include how the sisters built an international ministry that reached Ireland and Africa, including one who became tearful describing her experience ministering to people in Zambia enduring the AIDS crisis there in the 1980s.
McDermott Jain pointed to the commitment of the sisters who, despite great difficulties, remained present to the people they served.
They’re there to help people through the darkest and most difficult things imaginable,” she said.
Her goal is to get the film opportunities for major distribution, whether in theaters, on television or streaming services, building a major opportunity for exposure for an order that has seen fewer women enter on a yearly basis.
Yet they continue their missions with their current members, women who join the order, and with companions in lay ministry who work alongside the sisters in their educational, medical and ministries across the U.S., in Ireland and Kenya.
“We’ll go to the margins, and as Franciscans, that’s where we have been called to be,” said Sister Kathy Dougherty. “That has brought us great joy.”
As she shared in the final words of the documentary, the sisters serve simply because “it’s a matter of faith.”
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