Spain: Ten sisters excommunicated in conflict with the Vatican

Ten poor sisters from northern Spain, in a month-long open conflict with the Vatican, have been formally excommunicated, a rare decision against the backdrop of real estate standoffs and accusations of belonging to a sect.

It all started on May 13: This community of sixteen nuns from Santa Clara de Bellorado, housed in a 15th-century brick convent in the heart of a village of 1,800 inhabitants 50 kilometers from Burgos, announced its separation from the Church. Catholicism.

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The Mother Superior, Sister Isabel de la Trinidad, condemned the “persecution” to which the Church was subjected, which, she said, had caused the failure of their community’s acquisition project of another monastery located in the Spanish Basque Country.

The nuns accuse the Vatican of “double-speak” and “contradictions”, and say they now place themselves under the authority of the expelled priest, Pablo de Rojas Sanchez Franco.

This monk, excommunicated from the Catholic Church in 2019, is the founder of the “Pious Union of St. Paul the Apostle”, and he claims to be a “Legalist”, a movement that all the popes who succeeded Pius XII (1939 – 1958) consider to be like them. Heretics.

Commissioned by the Vatican to settle the matter, the Archbishop of Burgos, Monsignor Mario Isita, sent several representatives at the beginning of June, accompanied by a bailiff, to demand in vain the handing over of the keys to their monastery in Bellorado, which was his church. Ownership claims.

So the sisters were given an ultimatum: they must appear before an ecclesiastical court to confirm their decision to leave the Church.

But the rebellious sisters say they do not recognize this court, and call this measure a “farce”: on Friday they sent a recorded message to Monsignor Mario Isita in which they expressed their “unanimous and irrevocable desire” to leave the Church. æ

This decision is “the fruit of mature, reflective and informed thinking, which has been validated by all” the nuns of the community, as well as the Poor Clare Sisters, who say they are acting “freely and voluntarily”.

Among them: “On June 22, the Archbishop of Burgos, legal representative of the Belorado Monastery (…) transmitted the decree declaring the excommunication (…) of the ten sisters who caused the schism,” notes a press release published on Saturday. On the diocese's website.

“It was the sisters themselves who expressed their free and personal decision to renounce the Catholic Church,” the archbishop said.

“sect”

This type of decision is rare, as theologian Luis Santamaria, founder of the Ibero-American Network for the Study of Cults (RES) asserts: “Excommunication is the most serious punitive measure in canon law.”

He continues, “In the case of the Poor Clares of Bellorado specifically, they could no longer be considered Catholic nuns and it was natural for them to abandon a convent to which they no longer belonged.”

According to him, Pablo de Rojas is a “fake bishop”, at the head of “a sect born at the beginning of the twenty-first century that imitates traditional Catholicism and which declares itself the depository of the true Christian faith.”

He sees this desire to separate from the Church as a work of “misinformation, emotional pressure and lies about the poor Clares.”

Only 10 out of 16 nuns were affected by the process, after the church decided to exclude older sisters from the excommunication procedure, who were considered weak.