The Christophers: Filmaker Focuses on Ursuline Sisters
- Editor
- Oct 13
- 3 min read
By Tony Rossi,
Director of Communications
When he was growing up Presbyterian in Louisville, Kentucky, Morgan Atkinson’s friends, who attended Catholic school, described their teachers, the Ursuline Sisters, as “the toughest, meanest women on earth.” Those descriptions stuck in Morgan’s mind years later after he converted to Catholicism and embarked on a career as a filmmaker. His first documentary about the Ursulines in the 1980s dispelled the “tough and mean” mythology and led him to admire these women and their devotion to their vocation. His newest film about them, titled “In the Company of Change,” explores their history, faith, and decline in numbers.
For Morgan, the road to the Ursuline Sisters was paved by Thomas Merton, whose work he came across during his 20s, when he had “drifted away from any sort of religion or spirituality,” he recalled during a “Christopher Closeup” interview. Morgan visited Kentucky’s Abbey of Gethsemani, where Merton had lived. “In that weekend,” Morgan observed, “the presence of the place, the Office, the liturgy, everything about it spoke to me in a profound way…When one settles down a little bit and turns off a lot of the external noise and begins to listen to things, I gave that a chance to happen at Gethsemani. And it happened in a big way…so much so that six weeks later, at Pentecost, I became a Catholic.”
Morgan went on to produce documentaries about Gethsemani and Merton, and he eventually turned his attention to the Sisters his childhood friends had told him about because “so often in media and in popular culture, religious sisters get a pretty rough go of it…What often happens with my work, you get to know your subjects and you fall in love with them. And that was my case…For all the complaints I’ve heard about the Sisters, I’ve heard far more people say, ‘They changed my life.’…As the years went by, I became friends [with] some of the Sisters…In fact, one of [them], Sister Martha Buser, became my spiritual director.”
One of Sister Martha’s pearls of wisdom in the film is, “Jesus was the only one who wanted to be human. The rest of us want to be God. We want to be in control.” Insights like that kept Morgan coming back to her. He said, “In a world where everything is going at 150 miles an hour…she was this island of calm and wisdom with a sense of humor… She was pious and sweet, but she packaged that with a great sense of humor, a great sense of outrage on things in the Church and the outside world that you should be outraged about…I’m always grateful of being able to speak with her, to share my doubts, to have her be a booster when I wanted a booster, but also to be someone who would hold up a mirror and say, ‘Is this really the direction you think you should go?’”
Morgan hopes that viewers are touched by his film. He concluded, “One of the things about Merton that appealed to me so much is…a lot of his work was directed to people who are—what I always would call—outside the choir. It may not be your conventional churchgoer. I would hope that the work I’ve done, without dumbing it down, makes a form of spirituality accessible to people…that people go, ‘Oh gosh, a film about a nun or a film about a monk,’ but then you can see the human dimensions and maybe relate to your own life through it.”
For free copies of the Christopher News Note GUIDED BY THE HOLY SPIRIT, write: The Christophers, 264 West 40th Street, Room 603, New York, NY 10018; or e-mail: mail@christophers.org
