Rebel Spanish nuns break with Vatican

MADRID, Spain (AFP) — A community of nuns in a 15th century convent in northern Spain has split with the Roman Catholic Church because of a property dispute and doctrinal wrangling that has seen them join up with a renegade priest.

The Church has threatened to excommunicate the 16 nuns who live in Belorado, a town of 1,800 on the popular Camino de Santiago, or Way of St. James, pilgrimage trail, near Burgos.

The rebel nuns from the Order of St. Claire, announced their split from the Church in a letter published on social media on 13 May along with a 70-page “manifesto.”

In the letter, signed by the convent’s Mother Superior, Sister Isabel de la Trinidad, the nuns said they had broken away because they were being “persecuted” by the church hierarchy over the property dispute.

The nuns in 2020 reached a deal to buy a convent in Orduna about 100 kilometers north of Belorado but they said they were not able to pay for it because the Vatican blocked their planned sale of another abandoned property to fund the purchase.

The nuns announced they were now under the jurisdiction of excommunicated priest Pablo de Rojas Sanchez-Franco, who is known for his ultraconservative views.

He heads the Devout Union of the Apostle Saint Paul, a religious group regarded as a sect by the Catholic Church and presents himself as a bishop, appearing in public in episcopal robes.

Sanchez-Franco backs sedevacantism, a movement which holds that all popes since Pius XII, who died in 1958, are heretics and that there is currently no valid pontiff.