Archbishop Mario Iceta of Burgos issued a decree excommunicating 10 Poor Clares from the Belorado convent who had signed a fax denying the authority of the ecclesial tribunal to which he had summoned them.
Their excommunication on Saturday 22 June followed their refusal to attend the tribunal on Friday.
The nuns rejected the summons and reaffirmed their decision to leave the “conciliar Church” announced earlier this month.
The decree did not excommunicate five elderly sisters in the community who had not signed the fax, nor three sisters who are members of the community but not currently in residence.
Archbishop Iceta described excommunication as a measure the Church regards as “medicinal” and intended to “bring about reflection and personal conversion”. He indicated his readiness to receive the sisters back into communion should they change their attitude.
At the same time, the regional federation of Poor Clares made preparations to send a team of sisters to the convent to care for the elderly sisters.
The Belorado convent was also caught in complex property arrangements, following the community’s attempt to purchase the disused abbey of Orduña in the Basque Country from the Poor Clares of Vitoria.
After the Belorado community failed to make the agreed payments – partly because another transaction was blocked – the purchase was cancelled, but the now-excommunicant superior of Belorado has disputed this and threatened legal proceedings.
Since the decree of excommunication, the Belorado community has expressed support on social media for Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former apostolic nuncio to the United States, who was summoned by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to answer charges of schism.
Viganò said last week that the Second Vatican Council “represents the ideological, theological, moral and liturgical cancer of which the Bergoglian ‘synodal church’ is the necessary metastasis”.
“I reject and condemn the scandals, errors and heresies of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and … with this ‘Bergoglian church’, no Catholic worthy of the name can be in communion,” he said.
On 24 June, Archbishop Iceta demanded that the 10 excommunicated sisters leave the convent as they “had no legal title” to the premises.
“If there is no voluntary departure in the next few days, the diocese’s legal services will have no alternative but to begin the appropriate legal actions,” he said, suggesting they depart “perhaps by the beginning of July”.