Holy Trouble goes global!

What began on social media has now become an international documentary.

At the beginning of 2026, Suzanne Smith, an award-winning producer with ABC TV Australia, contacted the Sisters of Charity of New York after discovering the Congregation on Instagram. She had been following the Sisters’ growing Holy Trouble advocacy work and saw a larger story worth telling.

That story would eventually bring Smith and an ABC Australia film crew more than 10,000 miles from Australia to New York.

In June, the crew spent time with the Sisters, filming interviews and accompanying them as they continued their work for justice. But the resulting documentary, appropriately titled Holy Trouble, reaches much further back than the advocacy of the present moment.

Through contemporary interviews, archival photographs and footage, the documentary traces the Congregation’s decades-long commitment to social justice, connecting the Sisters’ public witness today with those who came before them — Sisters who marched for civil rights, advocated for peace, served people living in poverty, welcomed immigrants, cared for those whom society pushed to the margins, and repeatedly responded to the needs of their times.

The documentary features members of the SCNY Leadership Team along with Sisters, volunteers, ministry leaders, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer whose work has helped document the Sisters’ story.

The cameras also followed the Sisters and their partners beyond Mount Saint Vincent, capturing Holy Trouble as it continues to unfold today — including the ongoing prayerful witness and accompaniment of immigrant families outside Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey.

A Story That Began on Instagram

Perhaps one of the most unexpected parts of the Holy Trouble story is how the documentary came to be.

ABC Australia found the Sisters through Instagram.

What began as a way to share the Congregation’s mission, spirituality, advocacy, and public witness with a wider community ultimately carried that witness halfway around the world.

It is a powerful reminder that while the ways we communicate the mission continue to change, the mission itself does not.

For more than two centuries, the Sisters of Charity of New York have responded to the needs of the times. Today, that response can happen on the streets, at the bedside, in ministries serving those in need — and even through a post shared on social media.

After viewing the completed documentary, our hearts are full.

We offer our deep gratitude and blessings to ABC TV Australia, Compass, and the documentary’s extraordinarily talented producer, Suzanne Smith, for recognizing something in the Sisters’ witness worth sharing and for telling the story of their long commitment to social justice with such care.

And we are especially grateful that through their work, a little Holy Trouble will now travel around the world in ways we never could have imagined.

What began as a phrase became a movement.

And now, somehow, it has become a documentary.

But perhaps Holy Trouble isn’t really something new at all.

Generations of Sisters of Charity have been making it for more than 200 years.

Charity impels us.