Dr. said. Mario Isetta, at a press conference in the northern city: “Due to excommunication and expulsion from consecrated life, the ten nuns have no legal right to remain in the convents and the buildings attached to them, so they will have to leave them.” Spain, two days after the official excommunication of the nuns.
“If there is no voluntary departure in the near future, Legal Services will have no choice but to take legal action,” the archbishop warned, without setting a deadline for the nuns. “We are not setting a deadline, a precautionary deadline, we do not want to act hastily, we want to be very respectful and we hope they understand that, since they are no longer nuns, they do not belong in convents and they should.” “I wouldn’t be in this place,” he added.
The ten sisters live in the Santa Clara Convent in Belorado, a 15th-century place in the heart of a village of 1,800 people 50 kilometers from Burgos. In mid-May, the nuns decided to leave the church and place themselves under the authority of the excommunicated priest, Pablo de Rojas Sánchez Franco.
The matter comes in the context of a dispute over property and accusations of belonging to a sect.
The founder of the Pious Union of St. Paul the Apostle, Pablo de Rojas Sánchez Franco, who left the Catholic Church in 2019, claims to belong to the Methodists, a movement that considers all popes who succeeded Pius XII (1939-1958) to be heretics. .
It was the cancellation of the purchase of a monastery in the Spanish Basque Country that sparked the conflict. In 2020, the nuns reached an agreement with the neighboring Diocese of Vitoria to purchase the Orduña Monastery, but the sale ended in failure. The nuns said the deal was “stopped by Rome.” They also claim that they are being persecuted by the hierarchy.
At the beginning of June, the Archbishop of Burgos, who was assigned by the Vatican to handle the matter, sent several representatives, accompanied by a judicial representative, to demand, in vain, the handing over of the keys to the monastery.
