CLEVELAND -- Ursuline Sr. Dianna Ortiz was teaching Indigenous children as a missionary in Guatemala in 1989 when her ministry was torn apart in the midst of the country’s brutal civil war.

The reality of a dwindling, aging community is setting in for the Ursuline Sisters of Chatham, but it won’t keep them from continuing the work they’ve carried out for more than a century and a half in southwestern Ontario.

SASKATOON -- In the spring of 1919, three “prophetic women of hope” came from Germany to Saskatchewan to teach in a pocket of devout German-speaking Russian emigrants who had settled beneath the vast expanse of sky and plain at the edge of what are known as the Great Sand Hills.

QUEBEC – Daylight illuminates the monastery's long corridors, seeping through the old windows dotting its thick walls. The floor responds to the slightest step with an enveloping rustle, as today's Ursulines follow the footsteps of their predecessors. But this uninterrupted cycle that dates back to 17th-century New France is coming to an end.

When Grade 10 students at Bishop James Mahoney High School in Saskatoon learned about motion in physics class last year, they weren’t in a classroom. Instead, they met with former Air Force pilots at an airport hangar.

QUEBEC CITY - Thirty-one years after Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec City in 1608, three Ursuline sisters arrived in New France packing little more than their simple possessions and their faith. Today the sisters who inherited that founding legacy are set to leave their grand motherhouse in much the same way.