Janet Stuart: why we celebrate her memory

Why is the centenary of her death worth celebrating? Why is she someone whom we want to remember in the 21st century?

One reason is simply that she was a wonderful writer whose letters especially those written during her extensive travels around the USA and Latin America between 1898-1901 - bring the environment she observed vibrantly alive. Devotees of blogs and of Twitter can admire her imaginative, concise, lively essays on various aspects of spiritual life or of community life many of which still have something pertinent to say about relationships and the love of God.  

Secondly, she was the first rscj at senior management level in the English speaking world to interpret the spirituality of the Society in a context we can recognise as modern. She installed electricity and the telephone at Roehampton, travelled in trains and motor cars, had regular dealings with lawyers, house agents, and government inspectors. She experienced the struggle to respond to pressures for change whilst remaining faithful to the core values of the charism she had inherited. Essentially conservative, the choices she made were focussed on living the charism all the more deeply, though within the structures she had inherited. Today we might make different choices, and are not at all concerned, as she was, with safeguarding a monastic lifestyle. However, our freedom to be open to different ways of living religious life only works because we have learned the lessons she inherited from St Madeleine Sophie Barat and passed on in her own early 20th century idiom, of a person-centred  spirituality that is rooted in the love of the heart of Jesus.

A third reason for remembering Janet Stuart is that she was the first Superior General to be able to exploit improved transport opportunities in order to respond to the challenge  of establishing Cor Unum in a global organisation. Where Sophie Barat had to wait months for letters to pass between France and America, and where Mabel Digby (Stuarts predecessor) was inhibited by ill health and by a political instability in Europe that directly threatened the continued existence of religious orders in some parts of the continent, Stuart could take advantage of a window of relative calm between 1911-1914 to embark, literally, on a project to visit every community from Australia to America, from Chile to Japan.

The conferences she gave at each stop challenged religious to live up to high standards both in their religious life and in their professional lives as educators. More importantly, the way she delivered them created a felt impact that meant the visit was cherished long afterwards communities of sisters many of whom were far from home felt recognised, valued, encouraged, part of the greater whole. Although there was no attempt at acculturation, let alone enculturation, her round the world tour did evince a desire to listen and to know individuals in what was at the time a large and expanding organisation. She wrote that she had great plans for the future, though they needed time to develop. She was tragically not given that time, but she had used the time she had in a way that perhaps laid solid spiritual foundations for the radical changes that were to take place after the Second World War. 

The official photograph taken of Janet Stuart in 1911 when she was made Superior General rather overwhelms one with its stuffiness. To a modern eye, the habit is stifling, and the curtained bookshelves in the background add to the impression of an outdated propriety and repression of individuality. The individual seems absorbed into the organisation, and into the values she must, as Superior General, represent. However a closer look at the face within the wimple creates a more sympathetic effect. It is an authoritative, open and intelligent gaze, with a hint of humour at once reflective and engaged. In an essay written in 1904 Stuart wrote of how a personality can most fully reveal itself to an observer through a countenance that is in repose and unconscious of itself whilst fully turned to the observer&following its own thoughts. Intentionally or not this photograph seems to capture that idea. It is a face that gazes out of a 19th century religious culture into the 21st century - a speaking expression, with which one could even now holds a constructive and meaningful conversation.

Back to introduction to Janet Stuart