Religious sisters have not been present at the dialogue tables between opposition groups-like members of the church hierarchy have in Colombia-that resulted in the signing of peace agreements in 2016, but with their ministries and presence in towns that suffered near and far from Bogotá the capital, nuns have contributed to the peace process in an intimate way, said Sister Diana Herrera Castañeda.
A sister of the Congregation of St. Catherine of Siena, Sister Herrara still remembers tense weekends from her own childhood in Bogotá, noting, “It was the time of Pablo Escobar,” a Colombian drug trafficker who collaborated with other criminals to form the Medellín cartel in the 1970s.
Now, as an academic, Sister Herrera studies the role of religious sisters in Colombia’s more than 50-year conflict. “One begins to find that female religious life has played a very important role in accompaniment, and above all, accompaniment in the most violent places, where people expressed resistance,” said Sister Herrera in an interview with Global Sisters Report in Bogotá.
Stories of pain and violence, and people who need healing, abound. In some places, women religious have helped recover the historical memory of what happened in areas that suffered disproportionately from the war and, in some cases, where the conflict still lingers.
Picture: A man pulls a cart of recycled material past a mural that says, “From the heart comes peace,” in Bogotá, Colombia, 22nd November 2023. Though 2016 peace accords put an end to the decades-long conflict between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the government, Colombia’s poorest people, many in rural communities, still suffer violence, said Sister Diana Herrera Castañeda, a sister of the Congregation of St. Catherine of Siena. (OSV News photo/Rhina Guidos, Global Sisters Report)