“When sisters begin to tell their stories, they not only change the perception of religious life. They’re changing the perception of the margins,” the member of Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent DePaul (MVZ) said, adding that Sisters have the potential to challenge narratives that contribute to the marginalization of communities.
The communication expert at the DFC noted that the Pentecost Project addresses a media landscape increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence-generated content, the hyper-production of content, misinformation, and disinformation, developments she said are contributing to news avoidance and growing distrust in media.
“We live in a time where we have a crisis of narration, a crisis of the lack of stories. Human stories that unite us around what binds us together rather than what separates us,” Sr. Krapić said.
Referring to Pope Leo XIV’s message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications, she added, “We need faces and voices to speak for people again. We need inspirational, educational stories that underline our shared humanity, that show us what our common ground is.”
“To tell the human stories, you need to know the human stories. That’s why we would need very good investigative journalism by someone who really knows people well, and those stories are in the hands, in the hearts and minds of Catholic sisters,” she added.
In her August 6 presentation, the Catholic Sister highlighted the three pillars of the Pentecost Project: training and learning by doing, networking, and providing a storytelling platform that enables stories from local communities to reach a global audience.
“Every training course has about 100 Sisters participants from all parts of the world present, she said, noting that over 260 Sisters have already benefited from the training delivered by renowned media professionals and professors, covering social media management, participatory journalism, institutional communication, and other areas of professional communication.
According to Sr. Krapić, the Vatican initiative, which is supported by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, publishes weekly stories written by Catholic Sisters and translated into 10 languages, while also offering online communication courses and three-month internships at Vatican Media.
She noted that participatory journalism has become a particular focus of the training and went on to encourage the women Religious to “give the stage to the marginalized communities to tell their stories with their own words and to be presented the way they want to be presented in the global media.”
The Communication expert underscored that the need to strengthen the communication of Catholic Sisters is also connected to how the women Religious are represented in mainstream media and how they sometimes communicate about their own work.