Rebel Spanish nuns split with Vatican amid property spat

A community of nuns in northern Spain has split with the Vatican and claim they are being persecuted by the Catholic Church because of a property dispute.

The 16 rebel nuns, who live in a convent in the town of Belorado and belong to the Order of St Claire, announced their decision to separate from Catholic orthodoxy in a 70-page statement published online. In it, they declared that the last “valid” pope was Pius XII, who died in 1958.

“They will call us heretics and schismatic, crazy and many other things that are very slanderous and unpleasant,” said the statement, signed by Sr Isabel de la Trinidad, the abbess of the community. “Don’t believe them, at least on this occasion, don’t let them fool you.”

The nuns, the communique read, are now under the jurisdiction of Pablo de Rojas Sánchez-Franco, described as a “legitimate bishop of the Holy Church”.

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Dr De Rojas Sánchez-Franco heads the Devout Union of the Apostle Saint Paul, a religious group regarded as a sect by the Catholic Church, and in 2019, the bishop of Bilbao excommunicated him. He has reportedly been inside the convent with the nuns since their controversial announcement, although one of them subsequently abandoned the building because she disagreed with her colleagues’ actions.

The decision of the nuns, who are well-known for the chocolate desserts they bake, appears to be linked to their attempts to buy the Orduña monastery, about 95km north, in the Basque Country.

The archbishopric of Burgos, where the nuns are based, has said that they had agreed to buy the property from a local community of nuns for €1.2 million. After making an initial payment of €100,000, according to the archbishopric, the nuns failed to pay any more. However, Sr Isabel gave assurances that a benefactor would make the remaining payments, “raising suspicions that this person was not close to the Catholic Church”.

After Sr Isabel failed to meet with the Bishop of Vitoria, where the property is located, the sale contract was cancelled. However, she filed a legal complaint, claiming that her community had already spent a large amount of money renovating the monastery.

In the nuns’ statement, they denounced meddling “from Rome” in the issue, claiming that the church opposed their plans. However, José Ceacero, a priest who has been giving the nuns Mass and who is seen as an ally of Dr De Rojas Sánchez-Franco, told local media that doctrinal differences were the main cause of the split with the church.

“They have discovered that the doctrine and the faith taught by the church since the Second Vatican Council is not the same as the doctrine of the Catholic Church,” he said. He added that local church authorities had been “making life difficult” for the nuns.

“There is a property issue, but that’s not the main thing here,” the father of one of the nuns, named as Julio, told Spanish television. “The real issue is the new faith, the new way of living faith.”

The nuns have posted pictures and videos on Instagram since the controversy erupted. One video showed several of them with a group of elderly people, all of them smiling at the camera.

“We are well, the truth is not that we are kidnapped away from our families,” one of the nuns said in a video.