In recent years, interest in the voice of women religious has been increasing, as has the investment of women religious congregations themselves in internal and external communication. Religious life today is more aware of how digital communication is a mission in itself, and that doing mission also implies knowing how to communicate it well and in the appropriate places. Every mission or project requires a communicative dimension to be taken care of; communicating is a transversal competence that needs to be taken into account and included in formation courses.

In the great communicative revolution of the Vatican that led to the establishment of the largest Dicastery of the Roman Curia, the Dicastery for Communication, we found more space devoted to the missionary experience and the voices of women religious in the world.

We can say that today religious women are more visible in the public arena of the Catholic press (there is still much work to be done for the secular one), and more and more sisters are writing in the first person, moving from being 'objects' of information, to protagonists of their own public word and image.

Consequence and cause of this phenomenon is the great investment in the training of religious 'journalists and communicators,' capable of handling the complexity of communication, from content creation to multichannel management of communication. Training at the university level or promoted by organizations whose mission is precisely communication in the Church and religious life.

The Communications Office of the UISG, to date the representative organization of Catholic women religious in the world, was born in 2015. Since that time, every effort has been made to carve out a specific space for the communication of women's religious life, as a specific one in the great pool of institutional communication of the Catholic Church, and a specific voice of the women's world, within the sphere of consecrated life.

This publication is one of the fruits of this journey. The research on the reality of communication in women's religious life aims to recount this specificity and offer a realistic snapshot of the resources and criticalities it carries. Aware of the role that data and their interpretation represent for the information and digital communication society in which we live, we have chosen to collect, in these pages, the results of the questionnaires sent to the communication offices of women's religious congregations, members of the UISG and try to read them and hypothesize future paths to improve the quality of communication in women's religious life.

It is also meant to generate a change, a conversion: to look with new and unprejudiced eyes at a world of possibilities for evangelization.

• Read the reaserch data synthesis (available in English, Italian, Spanish and French)
• Read the entire "Sisters Communicate" publication (available in Italian only)