A group of 15 Poor Clare nuns from Belorado (Burgos) and Orduña (Bizkaia) have hit the table in the face of the “persecution” that, according to what they denounce, they suffer from superiors, pastors, sisters and priests as a result of an operation real estate type. These nuns have made public a forceful manifesto against the Conciliar Church, governed by the Pope, and have taken the step of abandoning it to join the Pious Union of Saint Paul the Apostle, which “pays obedience” to Pablo de Rojas Sánchez. Franco, a 42-year-old religious excommunicated five years ago by the Roman Church.
The movement, although it has sparked some jokes, is serious and, in fact, it is the first ecclesial schism carried out by nuns in Spain; That is, the first time that a group of nuns carry out a separation within the Church that, according to canon law, can lead to their excommunication.
Proof of the significance of this decision is the fact that Mario Iceta, archbishop of Burgos, appeared before the media yesterday to warn of the “seriousness” of the act, point out that it is an “attack of schism” and exhort the faithful to refrain from participating in any liturgical act carried out in the Monastery of Santa Clara de Belorado or in the Monastery of Santa Clara de Orduña.
Curiously, it was Iceta himself, when he was bishop of Bilbao, who was in charge of excommunicating Pablo de Rojas, a member of the Thuquist community, a follower of the Vietnamese schismatic bishop Ngo Dinh Thuc and now also a religious reference for these nuns. One of the accusations that the archbishop publicly leveled against De Rojas was that of “having been consecrated bishop by another schismatic: the infamous Monsignor Williamson, the Lefebvrian prelate who denies the Holocaust.”
In any case, the imbroglio of these nuns, beyond the religious differences that the sisters highlight, has a lot to do with the blocking of a real estate type operation that these Poor Clares wanted to carry out.
As stated in their manifesto, they had the intention of purchasing the Monastery of Orduña through the sale of a convent they owned in Derio (Bizkaia). The operation, however, has been frustrated by the Church’s refusal to grant them the sales license for the property located in Derio, something that has left the purchase-sale agreement for the other building on empty paper.
It hasn’t gone down well with the sisters. In their extensive statement they maintain that their properties “must be very sweet” for the Church and accuse them of being guided by economic interests to dismantle “traditional” communities and keep their properties in order to sell them.
For this reason, they have made the drastic decision to break with Rome, denying legitimacy to any Supreme Pontiff after Pius XII, who died in 1958, and embracing their new obedience. “They are going to call us heretics and schismatics, crazy people and many other things, very slanderous and unpleasant. Don’t believe them, at least this time, don’t let them fool you,” they point out.
