Excommunicated Poor Clares leave convent ahead of court-ordered eviction

The dispute began when members of the community signed a manifesto describing the post-Vatican II Church as illegitimate.

The excommunicated Poor Clares of Belorado have left their convent just ahead of a scheduled March 12 eviction, putting an end to a nearly two-year legal battle with the Archdiocese of Burgos in Spain.

The sisters announced their split from the Catholic Church in May 2024, leading to their excommunication a month later. Since then, they have faced allegations of financial misconduct, leading to the brief arrest of the community’s superior in November 2025.

In December, Spanish police transferred to another Poor Clares’ convent five older sisters who were neither excommunicated nor included in the eviction proceedings. The Archdiocese of Burgos also recently announced that two former nuns who had fled the convent have reconciled with the Catholic Church.

The Monastery of St. Clare in Belorado, northern Spain. Zarateman/wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0.

The eviction is the latest chapter in a dispute that erupted when 10 members of the Poor Clare community signed a 70-page “Catholic Manifesto” in May 2024 describing the post-Vatican II Catholic Church as illegitimate.

A month later, the nuns’ local bishop, Archbishop Mario Iceta of Burgos, sent a decree of excommunication to the nuns who signed the document, after they declined to appear before a Church tribunal.

Five other members of the community, who are reportedly elderly and in delicate health, did not incur excommunication as they did not endorse the schismatic declaration. One of the elderly sisters died in December 2025.

Schism is defined by canon law as the “refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.” The penalty attached to the canonical crime of schism is excommunication.

The excommunicated nuns refused to leave the convent of Belorado, arguing they were its rightful owners, prompting the Burgos archdiocese to take legal action.

A Spanish court ordered the women’s eviction from the monastery in August 2025. The women lost a series of court appeals against the decision. Spanish law enforcement was set to evict the Belorado convent in the morning of March 12, after the Poor Clares of Belorado exhausted all legal resources against the eviction proceedings.

Several local outlets reported that most of the excommunicated sisters had already moved to the convent of Orduña, a property originally owned by the community but now the subject of a separate eviction case because the Poor Clares of Belorado never completed payment for the property after acquiring it in 2020.

Only three nuns reportedly remained in Belorado to finalize the logistics of the move.

The nuns own a third convent in Derio but claimed in an interview to The New York Times that they didn’t wish to go there because the building was under demonic influence.

Because the Orduña case could end similarly to the Belorado eviction, the excommunicated nuns launched a fundraising campaign in February also asking supporters in Spain and abroad to propose properties where they could relocate. The campaign raised less than $500.

The women’s spokesman, Francisco Canals, said that after the sisters left Belorado some would temporarily move to Derio and others to a town near Toledo, “until they find a solution or a definitive space to settle.”

According to the Spanish outlet Vida Nueva, the excommunicated sisters heading to Toledo were expected to stay at a property owned by the family of one of the women.

Canals added that the women were evaluating three or four property proposals in northern Spain as possible locations to continue their schismatic community.

The Belorado community originally consisted of 16 sisters when they published the “Catholic Manifesto” announcing their break with the Catholic Church.

One sister left a day later, five older sisters between 86 and 100 years old weren’t excommunicated as they weren’t considered as part of the schism, while three sisters that originally signed the manifesto ended up leaving the community.

One of these sisters left the community in January, but remained working as the cook of a restaurant owned by the community in the Asturias region.

On Feb. 22, the Archdiocese of Burgos announced that it had lifted the excommunications against two of the sisters, Sister Paz and Sister Adriana, after they had left the community months before and had reconciled with the Church by “following an itinerary of conversion.”

However, the archdiocese clarified they were brought back to the Church as laypeople and that “if they wished to be religious again, they would have to start from scratch in a monastery.”

The statement added that the sisters “retracted the contents of the so-called ‘Catholic Manifesto’ publicly disseminated on May 13, 2024, and have been accompanied in a process of personal conversion that they lived with humility and gratitude.”

The eviction is the latest of a series of legal, financial, and canonical scandals in which the community has been involved.

Agents of the judicial police of Burgos and the Spanish civil guard entered the excommunicated nuns’ convent in the early morning of Nov. 27 with a warrant due to a potential crime of misappropriation of assets classified as historical heritage.

The Monastery of St. Clare of Belorado is officially recognized by UNESCO as part of the Camino Francés and routes of northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela. The sale, manipulation, or transfer of assets from the monastery is subject to strict rules and approval from relevant authorities, which the sisters allegedly did not seek.

The police arrested former abbess Laura García de Viedma, known as Sr. Isabel, and a woman identified as Sr. Paloma. They were later released while the investigation continues.

As part of the investigation, a 17th-century figurine of St. Anthony of Padua was discovered in an antiques store in Madrid that belonged to the monastery.

The breakaway nuns also face another investigation after Archbishop Iceta, the Vatican-appointed commissary to the community, filed a criminal complaint for three crimes of aggravated fraud.

In July 2024, it was reported that the nuns owed more than 42,000 euros (roughly $49,000) in unpaid invoices and almost 10,000 euros ($11,600) in unpaid salaries to convent staff. The archdiocese said it had not accessed all of the sisters’ financial information and that the monastery might have had additional debt.

According to local reports, the sisters bought items such as high-quality dry-cured ham, silk sheets, laptops, and cell phones, and even a fighting bull that had to be sold after it could not be tamed.

The nuns have also been reported to have sold more than 300,000 euros (around $350,000) in gold bars.

Local media reported that the Spanish social security institute ordered the community to return thousands of euros in pension money claimed on behalf of a nun who died in April 2022.

Despite the sister’s death, the community allegedly continued to collect the monthly payments of 400 euros (around $465) until January 2024.