iHeartPodcasts and Rococo Punch
13 episodes listed below
Faith, silence, and the cost of leaving.
The Turning: The Sisters Who Left follows women and former sisters who entered Mother Teresa’s order seeking holiness, service, and silence. Through careful interviews and context, it traces what devotion can become when obedience, secrecy, shame, and institutional power close around a life.
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The Turning: The Sisters Who Left is a careful narrative investigation of the Missionaries of Charity, the Catholic order associated with Mother Teresa. It begins in faith. Former sisters and former members describe the force of vocation: the attraction of prayer, service, silence, chastity, and a life organized around God. The show respects that longing. It also asks what happens when longing is placed inside an institution that prizes obedience and privacy. The series moves slowly through the details that matter: a young woman reading canon law, a former sister trying to explain a gap in her work history, letters sent after someone left, a room remembered as a place of harm. These are not decorative details. They are how the show builds its case. Mother Teresa is treated as a complicated center of gravity, not a flat symbol. Episodes place her childhood, her years with the Loretto sisters, her work in Calcutta, and the later sainthood process beside testimony from people whose lives were shaped by her order. The reporting also makes space for Catholic language without assuming everyone already knows it. Terms such as consecrated life, vows, canonization, and postulator appear inside human stories rather than as detached lesson material. That approach gives the series unusual intimacy. It can be tender. It can be hard to hear. One episode follows Eli Anastasia Damidova’s account of alleged sexual abuse and the way sacred language was used around it. Another sits with Kelly Dunham’s shame, humor, and isolation after leaving religious life. The show is especially strong on aftermath. Leaving is not treated as a clean break, but as a second ordeal involving money, identity, judgment, desire, community, and faith itself. Its pace is deliberate, with plain narration wrapped around long stretches of testimony. The effect is sober rather than sensational. For people interested in religion, power, gender, queerness, sainthood, and institutional silence, it offers a searching account of devotion under pressure.
Made for: For people drawn to serious narrative reporting about Catholic life, institutional secrecy, religious trauma, and the complicated aftermath of leaving a vowed community. It best suits those comfortable with slow, witness-led storytelling rather than quick debate.
What sets it apart: The series pairs intimate former-sister testimony with clear Catholic context, letting devotion and damage exist in the same frame. It is less a takedown than a disciplined examination of how sacred ideals can shelter both care and harm.
Thousands of women gave up everything to follow Mother Teresa, joining her storied Catholic order, the Missionaries of Charity. But some found that life inside this fiercely private religious order was not what they’d imagined. Former sisters who worked closely with Mother Teresa describe her bold vision and devotion to charity and prayer. But they also share stories of suffering and forbidden love, abuse and betrayal. If you make a lifelong vow, what does it mean to break it? What is the line between devotion and brainwashing? Can you truly give yourself to God?
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Former members' testimony reveals how vocation, institutional power, and continuing faith can remain entangled long after religious life ends.
The Turning: The Sisters Who Left builds its investigation through former members of the Missionaries of Charity, placing their accounts alongside the history and spiritual language of the order.
This is the show that lets former sisters complicate sainthood before you settle for the halo.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A measured look at vocation, delay, and church recognition.
This episode follows a woman's move toward consecrated virginity and keeps the story grounded in ordinary uncertainty. The strongest stretch is the run from teenage conviction to the discovery of canon law, along with the long-held mistake that she had to wait until 35.
A humane look at leaving religious life and rebuilding afterward.
The episode stays close to the shame, doubt, and practical strain that can follow leaving religious life. It works best in the small, specific moments: being asked why they left, feeling shut out, and trying to account for a near four-year gap in employment while entering the…
A careful look at sainthood, secrecy, and the strain beneath reverence.
The episode treats a convent in Rome, a dream of figurines coming alive, and the hidden letters behind Mother Teresa's sainthood as one uneasy whole.
A quiet, devastating account of how devotion and silence can be bent into coercion.
Silence hangs over Eli Anastasia Damidova, a former Missionaries of Charity nun, as he describes how a practice that once felt like prayer turned frightening after he left the order.
A careful origin story that follows Mother Teresa from loss to calling.
S1: Ep 3 follows Mother Teresa from family loss and religious calling into the life that made her famous. The episode works best when it lets the chronology do the heavy lifting: childhood grief, a teenage call, Calcutta under British rule, then the train ride where the voice…
Weekly Portuguese-language sermons from Pastor Pedro Bastoge on scripture, end times, and church life.
Host Erika Lantz interviews Jenna Cooper, a 36-year-old canon lawyer and consecrated virgin in Winona, Minnesota, about a Catholic vocation that currently counts roughly 5,000 practitioners worldwide.
Kelly Dunham left with shame.
Mary Johnson dreams of a potter.
Silence once felt holy.
The story begins with a childhood shaped by loss.