That’s what they look like gathered in a circle around a seasonal centre piece, dressed in comfortable cotton and sensible shoes. The only division among them is between intent listeners and careful speakers.

Sisters, friars and mendicant priests gathered for two days at a convent in north Toronto. They were as humble a group as could be imagined, as meek as any who might inherit the Earth. But the middle-aged nuns and priests were there Sept. 29 to discuss power.

“Now I really believe that we have power,” said Sr. Janice Jonescu, a St. Joseph Sister of Peterborough.

“We’ve certainly come to understand that power is a good thing,” said Ursuline Sister Sheila Smith. “The question comes, how do we use our power?”

One of their own, Dominican Father Philippe Leblanc, had an answer for Smith’s question.

“We’re a small group,” Leblanc pointed out. “The possibilities you have are to change the discourse. We don’t have tanks. We don’t have guns. We don’t have money. We have words. It’s what we (in the Christian monastic tradition) have been doing for 1,600 years.”

The way Leblanc does it is by running a small office in Geneva, a bully pulpit at the United Nations Human Rights Council. Together with Franciscans International, the Dominicans have the official status of non-governmental organizations with the right to present briefs to the UNHRC. They have used that status to name and shame nations.

Leblanc and his team were the first to bring up human rights abuses in Mexico’s Chiapas State, and their intervention in the early 1990s halted police action and changed government policy in Mexico. The Dominicans also challenged the morality and legality of sanctions against Iraq in 2000, bringing the plight of Iraqi children denied food and medicine to the attention of the world.

In both cases the Dominicans were able to document concrete examples of human rights violations to back up their claims because the religious order is present among the people doing pastoral and social justice work. The Dominicans trace their history among the native people of Central and South America back to Bartolomé de las Casas in the 16th  century, and they have been running schools and parishes in Iraq for more than 250 years.

“If you have no involvement in the struggle your credibility is zero,” Leblanc said.

Leblanc makes no bones about the political nature of what the Dominicans do in Geneva. They’re there to work the system, he said.

“You need to know how the system works so you can make it work for the people we’re representing,” said Leblanc.

For St. Joseph Sister Anne Lemire there are theological reasons for getting political.

“Jesus was right in the world. He was thrust into the middle of human lives,” she said. “We are called to share in the lives of the poor in a much more concrete way. We don’t want to be on the fringes. We want to be right out there with them.”

And it’s not just about far-away places and exotically foreign peoples, said Sr. Joan Atkinson from the London St. Joseph Sisters. The various women’s religious communities in Canada have had long-standing commitments to environmental issues and to the poor in Canada.

“We can speak to government. We can speak about social policy. We can speak about human rights with a fair amount of credibility,” she said.

There may not be as many religious as there once were, and their institutional presence may not match the glory days of the post-war generation, but there are still 700 women among the Federation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Canada. They bring to the table education, a history of involvement in issues and an array of well-connected friends.

“We continue to use our connections, our resources. Our money goes into this too,” Atkinson said. “We are having some impact.”

The sisters are leading by example. In London they have sold the old motherhouse and built a very green building to replace it — showing the broader community what can be done.

“We do lots of advocacy. We do it in the choices of things we buy. We do it in the educational efforts in what we do,” she said. “We’re expanding our own learning of where we can have power and influence throughout the world.”

It’s not the usual sort of power play, said Sacred Heart Father Peter McKenna. The power doesn’t come from themselves, but from the conversations they can start or join. It’s the power “to bring that Christian voice to the conversation,” he said.