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BURGOS.- The archbishop of the Spanish city of Burgos asked on Monday ten excommunicated Poor Clare nunsand in open rebellion against the Vatican, to abandon their convent and announced that they will resort to “legal action” if they do not leave within a “reasonable period.”
”In the face of excommunication and expulsion from consecrated life, The ten nuns lack legal title to remain in the monasteries and annexes, so they must leave them.” declared Monsignor Mario Iceta at a press conference in the northern Spanish city, two days after the official excommunication of the nuns.
”If a voluntary departure does not occur in the near future, the legal services will have no choice but to initiate the legal actions that may arise.“, the archbishop warned, without giving the nuns a deadline.
”We have not set a deadline, a reasonable period of time, We do not want to act hastily, we want to be very respectful and we hope that they realize that, since they are no longer religious, they do not belong to the monasteries and should not be in that place,” he added. “They are not nuns, they are ex-nuns. And what are ex-nuns doing in a cloistered convent?”
These ten sisters live in the convent of Santa Clara in the town of Beloradoa 15th century enclosure in the heart of a town of 1,800 residents 50 kilometers from Burgos.
Meanwhile, the nuns have already hired a legal team to negotiate with the Archbishopric.“a peaceful and extrajudicial solution to the conflict that allows the recognition of their personal and property rights that are being plundered,” as detailed The country.
The nuns decided in mid-May to leave the Church and place themselves under the authority of an excommunicated priest, Pablo de Rojas Sánchez-Franco. The affair erupted against a backdrop of property disputes and accusations of cult membership.
Founder of the “Pious Union of Saint Paul the Apostle”, Pablo de Rojas Sánchez-Franco, expelled from the Catholic Church in 2019, claims to belong to “sedevacantism”, movement that considers all the popes who succeeded Pius XII (1939-1958) heretics. According to the archbishop of Burgos, he and another unidentified person have been in the convent for about a month.
It was the cancellation of the purchase of a convent in the Spanish Basque Country that sparked the conflict. In 2020, the nuns reached an agreement with the neighboring bishopric of Vitoria to buy the Orduña convent, but the sale ultimately fell through. The transaction was “blocked from Rome,” the nuns said.
They also claim to be persecuted by their hierarchy.
At the beginning of June, the archbishop of Burgos, whom the Vatican had asked to settle the matter, sent several representatives, accompanied by a judicial agent, to demand, in vain, the delivery of the keys to his convent.
AFP agency and newspaper The country
THE NATION
