A group of 15 nuns from the Spanish convents of Santa Clara de Belorado, in Burgos, and Ordunã, in Biscay, decided to put their foot down and turn their backs on the Catholic Church. The case is causing a stir in the neighboring country and the story has surprising outlines.

The origin of this decision is the “persecution” that, according to these nuns, they suffer from superiors, parish priests, nuns and priests, of which the decision of Rome to “block” their request to sell a convent that they own and that is empty in Derio, in Biscay, so that they can acquire the monastery of Orduña, belonging to the Diocese of Vitória, with which they had a purchase and sale contract.

The nuns even announced that they have cut ties with the Vatican, stating that they do not recognize the legitimacy of Pope Francis.

The case also involves an excommunicated bishop, idolized by these nuns. In a statement made public on Monday by Sister Isabel de la Trinidad, the abbess of the community, the nuns proclaimed that from now on they would be under the tutelage and jurisdiction of Pablo de Rojas Sánchez-Franco and his so-called Pia União Sancti Pauli Apostoli.

Pablo de Rojas Sánchez-Franco is a bishop excommunicated in 2019, and who presents himself as an imperial duke and five times Grand Duke of Spain. According to a specialist theologian, he is "a megalomaniacal character with delusions of grandeur, who combines the ecclesiastical and the aristocratic, who walks around Bilbao with episcopal ornaments from another era and who, in this case, everything seems to indicate that he took advantage of a situation of vulnerability of a community of nuns to present himself to the Poor Clares as the savior of the community itself and of the entire Catholic Church”.

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Confronted with this situation, they claim that "they are not imprisoned, nor kidnapped, nor manipulated, nor estranged from their families".

The nuns' goal is to be part of an entity with the right to manage their own legal affairs. After the break with Rome, they are no longer under the jurisdiction of canon law and have absolute powers to sell or buy property without the necessary authorization from the Vatican. Having said that, they hope to be able to proceed with the sale of the convent in question.

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