Two Spanish nuns excommunicated by the Vatican in 2024 were briefly detained and later released for allegedly selling works belonging to the Church, according to information released this Friday, November 28, by a court in the province of Burgos.
“The Briviesca court of first instance granted conditional release to the two former nuns detained on Thursday, who are being investigated for misappropriation of cultural property”the court said in a statement, also mentioning that the antique dealer accused of receiving the works of sacred art was also released on bail.
These two nuns are part of a group of Spanish nuns excommunicated in 2024 by the Vatican after having become close to a sect considered heretical by the Catholic Church.
Although excommunicated, the Clarissa nuns continue to occupy the convent of Santa Clara de Belorado, 50 kilometers from Burgos, despite a court decision ordering their expulsion from the place, which belongs to the Catholic Church. The nuns appealed and the process is still ongoing.
The Spanish court did not provide details about the allegedly stolen works, but the newspaper The Country he adds that the nuns would have participated in the trafficking of religious objects from the convent, which were the target of searches this Thursday morning.
“We have not committed any crime and we have nothing to hide”, defended one of the nuns in a video published this Thursday night on her Instagram account.
Excommunicated by the Church as part of a highly publicized case in Spain, these Poor Clare sisters justified, in a 70-page manifesto released in the spring of last year, their break with the Church due to alleged persecution by their hierarchy, which, according to them, caused the failure of a project for the acquisition by their community of another convent, located in the Spanish Basque Country.
The nuns described the then Pope Francis as a “usurper”, pointed out an alleged “doctrinal chaos” in the Vatican and announced that they would place themselves under the authority of a priest expelled from the Catholic Church in 2019 by the Archbishop of Burgos, Pablo de Rojas Sánchez-Franco, founder of the Pious Union of Saint Paul the Apostle and who claims “sedevacantism”, a current that considers all the popes who succeeded Pius XII to be heretical. (1939-1958).