“There’s nothing left in the shop and the others are still clearing up lunch. They can’t talk now and we haven’t eaten yet.”
She is the youngest member of the group formed around three schismatic nuns who have dared to defy their archbishop and have emerged from cloister with a vengeance.
It’s 5 p.m. on a Saturday. “I’m so hungry my stomach hurts,” she adds, with a huge smile.
Another day for the rebellious nuns, and another 90 people fed in the restaurant they run in Arriondas, a town of 2,000 inhabitants on the north coast of Spain.
Three of the Clarisas abandoned the convent where they lived in central Spain after a protracted row with the Archbishop of Burgos.
Ten others, five of them aged between 82 and 100, stayed behind, along with the abbess (Mother Isabel de la Trinidad, 57), and the fugitives are working long hours to support themselves and those still in Belorado.
Selling chocolates online was bringing in poor returns, so they set up a rural hotel in a disused convent in Vizcaya province and were breeding and training dogs for the blind and as emotional support pets.
Then a recently closed hotel in Asturias offered them its facilities and they bought a plot of land a few miles away with a view to setting up a more professional dog breeding centre, once they have obtained the necessary official qualifications through online courses.
“We want to work, and the Church doesn’t like that sort of thing,” Sister Sión, 40, said in an interview in the still-stocked shop a few days earlier. The nuns follow the magisterium and Latin form of mass that predate the Second Vatican Council, which they reject vehemently.
“A number of monks and priests have come to see us and have given us the Tridentine mass, but they can’t stay here. The bishop is trying to find us a solution,” she adds.
She is called to the restaurant to attend to an elderly woman who is feeling faint,
Sister Miriam, 42, stays to talk to the Herald.
“It’s not so much a question of modernising the Church. We simply want to live our faith, the authentic form of faith,” she says.
She is in charge of the kitchens, where they prepare a €15 three-course menu five days a week.
“The worst part is thinking up the menus, “ Sister Miriam says. Her mother and sister have come to live in the hotel and are also working flat out.
“My mother is delighted. I entered the convent 23 years ago and this is the first time since then that we have been able to live together,” she adds.
Rosa Navarro serves behind the bar and is somewhat frazzled as the second sitting drags on and Rocío, dressed in black waitress clothes, comes along with more orders for coffee.
“I was drawing a pension, but they asked me to come and I said, ‘well, why not?’”
The outside of the nuns’ restaurant (image courtesy author)
The Clarisas’ dispute with the archbishop of Burgos has been running for years and was due to culminate in a court hearing on 13 May to decide whether the nuns will be evicted from Belorado, but the hearing was suspended after the nuns challenged the impartiality of the judge.
“This is the first time that civil and ecclesiastical law meet head on,” says Francisco Canals, the media spokesman the nuns have contracted.
Canals says press reports that the nuns have been spending their money on silk sheets and high-end Iberian ham are all part of a smear campaign the official Church is waging against them via Catholic-leaning media. There have also been insinuations that the nuns may have smelted the convent’s religious treasures into gold bars.
The abbess, with the full backing of most of the nuns, published a strongly-worded 70-page manifesto a year ago, rejecting the rites of the Catholic Church as established by the Second Vatican Council. This led to them being excommunicated and the Archbishop of Burgos freezing their bank accounts, in the name of the Vatican.
“Belorado has never belonged to the Church. It has been the property of the community of nuns, which is a legal entity, for 700 years,” Canals says.
The convent’s running costs are enormous, but the nuns were able to finance themselves until their accounts were blocked; though they had €250,000 in gold, a traditional investment for communities such as theirs, who take a long view of financial markets.
Natxo de Gamón, spokesman for the Archbishop of Burgos, says the diocese has no reason to suspect the gold is ill-gotten, although it had no previous knowledge of its existence. He denies that the Church is attacking the schismatic nuns through the press.
“We simply provide information, while treating the ex-nuns with the utmost respect,” he said. The Church has no problem with the concept of the nuns working, but they should have set up their businesses better.
The rural hotel the nuns opened in Derio, a disused monastery in the Basque Country, lacked permits, so the local authorities closed it down, and the dog training centre in Belorado was unlicensed and the regional government slapped it with a fine after neighbours complained about noise.
“They are very enterprising, but they need to do things legally . . . The Church had to pay the fine of €3,600,” De Gamón said.
He maintains that “these señoras” have deliberately severed all their ties with the Catholic Church so cannot lay claim to any Church property. The diocese has made arrangements for the five very elderly nuns, deemed innocent, or perhaps unaware, of the excommunication, to be rehoused with other Clarisa communities, but it insists on expelling the schismatic members from the convent.
Meanwhile, in Arriondas, the sisters deal with customers wanting to take photos with the sisters and spend the afternoon drinking on their patio, while still maintaining some semblance of cloister on the upstairs floors of the hotel and continuing their traditional routine of prayer.
Locals are delighted with the nuns’ presence in the rural town. Life outside the main tourist season, when bright coloured canoes pack the river and tens of thousands of music festival goers strip the shelves of the supermarkets, is a dreary affair. Ironmongers do a good trade, but the streets are empty and many of the bars and shops are shuttered.
“We seem to have brought some life to the town,” Sister Sión says, adding that interest in joining their religious community has also increased. As well as Rocío, two other young women are preparing to come.
“Many people have become wary of the church, or have suffered from the (sexual) abuse cases and are looking for ways to continue to practise their faith,” she says.
“We have no regrets about what we have done,” she says of the schism. “We assume the consequences, and there are many.”
The abbess’s manifesto
In her manifesto, the abbess attacks the church for departing from the traditional rites, rejects the authority of all the popes since Pius XII, and swears allegiance to the excommunicated bishop Pablo de Rojas, whose appointment can be traced back, via two others, to a bishop named directly by Pius XII.
Vatican II, she says, is a “heretical council, which errs both in faith and morality . . . It is the worst larceny in the history of humanity . . . It has stolen and supplanted the faith of thousands of millions of believers.”
She criticises Vatican II for taking out of context the words “mystery of faith”, which she attributes to Monsignor Montini, better known as Pope Paul VI, accusing him of “showing heretical arrogance and contradicting the church’s 2,000-year-old magisterium and the apostolic tradition.”
“The Novus Ordo ( Missae) of Mons. Montini is totally invalid, null, illicit, offensive, heretical, counter to Catholic faith and perfidious.”
The manifesto concludes by recognising Pius XII, who died in 1958, as the last true pope and rejecting outright all later teachings. The archbishop of Burgos is named as yet another usurper as he was not ordained under the Roman ritual, which is the only one the nuns accept.
“We cannot obey heretics,” she says.