Recently, I was able to screen the documentary Interrupted Lives: Catholic Sisters Under European Communism. Part of the Vision & Values series created by the Interfaith Broadcasting Commission, of which the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is a member, this documentary was truly eye-opening. I never thought of what these Sisters could have been going through at the end of the Second World War. Under Stalin’s communist regime, religious sisters in Eastern and Central Europe found themselves driven out of their convents overnight, forced to do farm and factory labour, imprisoned and beaten, some facing exile for at least 40 years. One Sister told the story of how she was beaten again and again and she couldn’t believe that all this was real.