Sabine Rousseau’s scientific contributions

The crisis of the feminine religious vocations was acknowledged later than that of the priestly vocations, yet it compelled the Roman Catholic Church to reconsider the future of religious life in the 1960s and 1970s. When faced with the failure of the pastoral campaign to arouse vocations and remedy the recruiting predicament but also to cope with a wave of forsaking, the Church gave ecclesial answers so as to modernize the nuns’ living conditions and then carried out a theological reflection so that nuns could become more deeply involved in their own vocations. Françoise Vandermeersch who belonged to the Congrégation des Auxiliatrices and was the manageress of the review Échanges gives us the opportunity to have a special look into it thanks to her uncommon progression in the depths of these collective evolutions.