There’s a good chance you’ve benefited from the work of the Sisters of St. Martha without ever knowing it. If you’ve been treated at St. Martha’s Regional Hospital, used community transit, found support through SAFE or the Friendship Corner, or simply walked through the Bethany Centennial Garden behind the hospital on a difficult day — the Marthas are somewhere in that story.

This year marks 125 years since the congregation was founded, and Justin and Anuj sat down with Sister Joanne O’Regan, General Secretary of the congregation’s leadership team, and Marielle Assad, Coordinator of Charism Ministry and longtime Martha associate, for a wide-ranging conversation about where the Sisters came from, how they’ve shaped Antigonish, and what they’re planning for the future.

What Is Gospel Hospitality — And What Is Charism?

For the uninitiated, this episode starts with a little vocabulary. Charism, as Marielle Assad explains it, is the spiritual gift or inner spark you’re born with that gives you your purpose in the world — the thing that, once you tap into it, sets you on fire with meaning. Different religious communities have their own charism: healing, education, creativity. For the Sisters of St. Martha, that charism is gospel hospitality.

Not hospitality in the hotel-concierge sense. Gospel hospitality is rooted in the example of Jesus of Nazareth, who ate with criminals, taught women, and healed people on the margins of society. It’s a radical, inclusive welcome that says no one is too broken, too poor, or too different to be worthy of care and dignity. That spirit has been at the core of everything the Marthas have done since 1900 — even before they had a name for it.

An Origin Story Worth Knowing

The Sisters of St. Martha were founded in Antigonish in 1900 at the call of the local Bishop, who needed someone to take over the domestic and care operations of St. Francis Xavier University. What became the Coady Administrative Building was their original mother house; they lived on campus, cared for sick students, fed people, and kept the institution running — for two dollars a month.

The founding group of 15 women is itself a remarkable story. They volunteered without knowing who else had volunteered — their habits gave them no peripheral vision, and they weren’t permitted to speak to one another beforehand. They simply stood up. That act of standing together as a collective became a symbolic touchstone for the congregation. To this day, when the Marthas make a major decision — like the gut-wrenching choice to deconstruct their Bethany mother house in 2019 — they mark it by standing together.

Within a year of their founding, the sisters had already been called out to do healthcare work in Glace Bay, and they immediately began raising money — door to door — to build Antigonish its first hospital. They could only afford one good pair of shoes, so they shared them. St. Martha’s Hospital opened in 1906.

125 Years of Impact — Much of It Invisible

One of the recurring themes of this conversation is how little credit the Marthas have historically sought. Sister Joanne describes the discomfort of even sitting for this interview — talking about themselves doesn’t come naturally to a congregation whose mission statement centers on responding to the needs of others, not celebrating their own accomplishments.

But the list of things they’ve been part of is extraordinary. Beyond founding and running the hospital for nearly a century, the Sisters were deeply involved in the social work and community development movements that grew out of the Antigonish Movement — the cooperative and adult education tradition associated with StFX that influenced community organizing around the world. The Coady Institute bears the name of a priest who worked alongside them. The library at the Coady bears the name of Sister Marie Michael, who ran it and helped connect the community to a global conversation about poverty, dignity, and development.

More recently, in the early 2000s, a conversation between two Martha-connected people and community organizer Lucille Harper gave birth to the Antigonish Poverty Reduction Coalition — out of which came community transit and the Affordable Housing Society. The Marthas stood publicly with the Women’s Resource Centre during a women’s march. They’ve been consistent supporters of SAFE and the Friendship Corner program.

Most of this happened quietly, without press releases or self-congratulation. That’s partly by design.

The Hospital, the Habits, and the Transition

The Sisters sold St. Martha’s Hospital to the government in the mid-1990s, when changes to the Canada Health Act made it the right move. They left StFX’s campus in 1994. They deconstructed Bethany — the grand mother house that had stood since 1921 — in 2019, having moved their elder sisters into Parkland Antigonish, a care facility built partly on land the congregation sold for that purpose. The sisters are still close to the property they’ve always called home; their cemetery is there, their offices are there, and the Bethany Centennial Garden — designed with community input, featuring a steeple, a reflecting pool, ruins of the original foundation, and storyboards about the congregation’s history — is there for anyone to walk through.

The habits came off in 1967, after the Second Vatican Council opened the door to change across religious life. Sister Joanne is careful not to frame this as better or worse than congregations that kept their distinctive dress — just different. For the Marthas, moving through the community without a visible marker of religious identity felt more consistent with who they were trying to be.

What Comes Next: Opening the Door, Not Closing It

The Sisters of St. Martha are a smaller congregation than they once were. That’s not unique to them — it’s the reality for most women’s religious congregations in North America. But Sister Joanne pushes back gently on the narrative that declining numbers mean something went wrong. Vatican II asked the Church to “read the signs of the times,” and reading those signs honestly means recognizing that the state now provides many of the services the Marthas once filled the gap on. That’s not failure — that’s mission accomplished, in a way.

What the congregation is actively discerning now is what their evolving role looks like. Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si — which calls for an “integral ecology” that holds together the spiritual, social, economic, cultural, and environmental dimensions of life — has become the lens through which they’re making decisions. That means the Martha Justice Ministry is focused not just on human poverty but on the cry of the earth, listening to the land, and incorporating indigenous ways of knowing. Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall visited to speak about Two-Eyed Seeing. Carrie Prosper and Clifford Paul came to help them listen to the land they steward.

That land — a significant property that includes old-growth forest, farm space, contemplative hermitages, and the Centennial Garden — is not for sale and will not be subdivided. Plans are still being discerned, but the direction is clear: it will serve community, contemplation, and ecological care. Young farmers are already learning to grow food and market it on the property.

This summer, as part of the 125th anniversary celebrations, playwright Laura Teasdale has written eight short plays about gospel hospitality to be performed in the Centennial Gardens in late July.

A Gift to the Town

Sister Joanne’s closing words to the people of Antigonish are worth sitting with. She says the Martha spirit — the impulse toward radical hospitality, toward making room for others, toward ensuring no one is left behind — already lives in this community. The congregation’s greatest wish for their 125th year is not recognition but continuation. “Standing together in undaunted hope,” reads the inscription at the base of the steeple at the Centennial Garden — and Sister Joanne is clear: that’s not just the Marthas standing together. That’s all of us.

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