MADRID, Spain – A Spanish archbishop asked the courts on Monday to evict 10 nuns who are refusing to leave a convent after being excommunicated in a dispute with the Vatican.
The Archbishop of Burgos, Mario Iceta, demanded in June that the Poor Clare sisters leave the 15th-century convent of Santa Clara in the northern town of Belorado.
The nuns announced in May that they were breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church because it had blocked their attempt to buy another convent.
They declared allegiance to a group that challenges the legitimacy of the current Pope.
“Following a sensible waiting period, having established that the former nuns have made no attempt to reconsider, our legal services have filed a case” in court to have them evicted, the archbishop’s office said in a statement on Monday.
The nuns say they see themselves as under the jurisdiction of excommunicated ultraconservative priest Pablo de Rojas Sanchez-Franco, head of a group regarded as heretics by the Catholic Church and considered by some experts to be a sect.
