Vatican Communication Expert Urges Catholic Media Entities in Kenya to Amplify Voices of Women Religious

“They (Catholic Sisters) are highly trained professionals and experts in what they're doing, and that's why we also train them to speak in the media. There's no reason that they cannot be relevant speakers for any, not just the Church, but any civil media, when we're talking about social policies or anything else,” she said.

She said that Sisters “know their people the best”, noting that the training initiative has “the cooperation with the institutions of the Church and all the other civil institutions.”

The MVZ member told the Catholic communicators meeting at JJ McCarthy Centre in the Catholic Archdiocese of Nairobi (ADN) that the dicastery has trained women from various countries in Africa, including Malawi, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Ghana, and Uganda. 

“Last year (2024) we trained them in social media communication. This year we're training them in participatory journalism, which is again connected to collaboration,” she said, adding that what the dicastery is doing is to form the Sisters to tell the stories about the people they're working with.

Sr. Nina added that in addition to offering formation on communication to the Sisters, the Vatican dicastery is also facilitating them to have their stories published in women's Church journals, an initiative whose impact she described as “pretty big.”

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“Things actually started changing,” she said, referring to the positive feedback the dicastery is receiving on the impact of some of the stories the beneficiaries of the formation have produced. “When the problems cannot be solved on a hyper-local level, we just give them the space, put them on a global level, and things start changing,” she said.

The Vatican official observed that the “systematic changes” that the DFC is “trying to make are empowering them to change the perceptions about the people they're working with” and are also helping them “to develop social changes in their local environments.”

In her November 18 address, the Croatian-born communication expert said the formation of Sisters is also aimed at helping to reclaim the identity of the women Religious which she lamented is getting eroded by “an emerging trend” on social media platforms.

Sr. Nina noted that there is a growing narrative about the Religious that doesn't truly reflect their identity.

“Entertainment has become the most popular communication style of religious sisters. The most viral videos are of sisters dancing, singing, or scandals,” she said, and added that formation “is an opportunity for sisters to reclaim the narratives about themselves, to be a very strong communication potential of the Church, carriers of the communication of what the Church is really doing.”