As part of a larger Catholic International, religious orders and congregations around the world were rethinking their internationalism in response to the spirit of aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and post-war social movements. As significant historical actors within the Catholic International, women religious (sisters and nuns) began questioning social structures, gender relations and the dynamics of power and authority from within the convent and in the wider world. Persuaded in the 1970s and 1980s particularly by the global discourse of social justice influenced by liberation theology, some British religious institutes left their institutional work running large schools and hospitals to move into new ministries. This chapter interrogates one of these new ministries: the Sisters of Mercy’s missionary work in the barrios of Peru. Motivated by faith and initially without an explicitly feminist or political agenda, women religious as internationalists negotiated how their internationalism was defined, lived and experienced. Missionary work was one of the earliest forms of internationalism but the Peru mission offered a different way of ‘doing’ internationalism. Missionary praxis diverged from the top down structures of nineteenth-century internationalism to stress solidarity and collaboration with both the peoples of Peru and other international groups. The Peru mission integrated global thinking revealing both a local mission done globally, as part of an extensive Catholic International and ‘bearing witness’ to Catholic communities in England; and a global mission done locally with religious sisters living and collaborating with Peruvians in the barriadas
