Women's Congregations as

Many Catholic women's congregations are transnational in their orientation. Although their 'motherhouses ' are situated in one country or nation-state, other houses and branches (Filialen) are dispersed in different parts of the world. Even in the 19th century, when many of the Catholic women's congregations were founded, some of their mbers left the boundaries of their locality, region or nation to work abroad. These transnational activities of nuns were not just the consequence or concomitant of colonialism, but were also the effect of politico-religious conflicts that emerged within the process of nation-building in western countries. Based on my fieldwork in the German motherhouse of the “Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ”, an international Catholic women's congregation from its very beginning in 1851, I would like to focus in the first part of my paper on the conflicts that occurred during the German “Kulturkampf ” , a conflict between Rome and the state in the last decades of the 19th century. Those events affected the formation and extension of the nuns ' transnational networks. In the second part of my paper I would like to outline the transformations within women´s congregations after the Second Vatican Council which had considerable implications for th