(RNS) — In September, three octogenarian Augustinian nuns left their nursing home in Austria to return to their convent at Schloss Goldenstein, outside Salzburg. The sisters allege they were removed from their convent and placed in care without their consent after their aging community dwindled below the canonical (if arbitrary) minimum of eight professed religious members. The story made headlines, which reliably used terms such as “defiant” or “independent” in glorying over the “nuns on the run.”
But defiant, independent and even rebellious nuns are hardly a new phenomenon. The 2020s especially have seen nuns defy the often unexamined assumptions that religious women, hidden behind their convent walls, are fundamentally passive and obedient. Women “religious” — those who take vows but aren’t ordained — turn out to be unafraid to defy both the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the secular courts.
In June 2024, 10 members of the Poor Clares of Belorado, in northern Spain, were excommunicated by the archbishop of Burgos after announcing they were breaking with the Vatican over doctrinal differences. Their action, however, was incited by an ongoing dispute with the local bishop over a convent the Clares had arranged to buy, using funds from another property owned by the order. When the Vatican blocked that sale, the disagreement ended with the sisters’ alignment with the excommunicated Society of St. Pius X, a movement that rejects the validity of all popes since the death of Pius XII in 1958.
The nuns were promptly expelled from consecrated life, and the archbishop claimed the convent, ruling it belonged to five sisters who had not been excommunicated. The nuns refused to leave, and the bishop instituted eviction proceedings in the local court. The court found in favor of the archbishop, but the nuns’ eviction has been delayed by ongoing appeals. One sister explained that the convent “is ours. We are not isolated nuns, we are a legal entity, and they are our possessions.”
The women in Belorado have a mighty and inspiring role model in St. Clare, whose persistence in demanding to be allowed to found an order to pursue “the privilege of poverty” is legendary. She wore down two popes until, at last, Innocent IV approved her demand and, two days before her death in 1253, granted to the order absolute poverty. This cemented the Poor Clares’ reputation as tenacious nuns who can and will follow their own path, even if it means defying ecclesiastical authority.
In 2023, Mother Teresa Agnes, superior of the Discalced Carmelites community in Arlington, Texas, was investigated by Bishop Michael Olson of the Diocese of Fort Worth for allegedly breaking her vow of chastity with a priest and for “stubborn disobedience.” “Discalced” means barefoot, reflecting the strength and determination of members of this branch of the order founded in 1562 by St. Teresa of Ávila. The bishop’s ruling of guilty was overturned on procedural grounds by the Vatican, which also concluded that, although she committed sexual immorality, Mother Teresa Agnes had not abused her authority as superior.
The incident did not end there. The bishop’s investigation led the sisters to file a lawsuit against him for invasion of privacy. The resultant controversy involved civil and ecclesiastical courts, law enforcement authorities and even allegations that the nuns were using cannabis.
Publicly rejecting Olson’s attempt to exercise governance over the convent — they said he was trying to lay hold of their real estate — the community was placed under the trusteeship of the Discalced Carmelite Association, whose authority it also rejected. Finally, the nuns announced they, like their Poor Clare sisters, had affiliated with the St. Pius X Society and had reelected Teresa Agnes their superior. In December 2024, the Vatican dissolved the community, which the sisters countered by transferring ownership of their convent to a foundation.
Despite being laicized and excommunicated, the sisters continue as a community of Discalced Carmelite nuns and maintain an active program of worship and a website.
Tempting as it might be to blame either post-Vatican II reforms, conservative rejection of its more progressive attitudes or creeping feminism, such power struggles between women religious and their bishops abound in the history of the church.
In 1136, when the great abbess and scholar St. Hildegard of Bingen was unanimously elected as superior by the community of Disibodenberg, Kuno, abbot of the complementary monastery for men, tried to persuade Hildegard to settle for the role of prioress, under his authority, rather than assume her rightful and equal role as abbess. To ensure her authority and her community’s independence, Hildegard asked Kuno to allow them to move to Rupertsberg. When the abbot declined, Hildegard went over his head and got approval from the archbishop of Mainz.
Nuns of the early Middle Ages were known to employ physical force and violence to ensure their autonomy. In his “History of the Franks,” Gregory, bishop of Tours, records a revolt by nuns at the Abbey Sainte-Croix in Poitiers in 589-590. Approximately 40 nuns rebelled against an abbess they considered too harsh and inappropriate for nuns who were also princesses. Denied, the recalcitrant nuns hired soldiers and launched a full-fledged military revolt against their abbess and local ecclesiastical authorities. They kidnapped the abbess and even attacked the king’s representatives.
Gregory, it should be noted, appears far more disconcerted by the nuns’ disobedience to male ecclesiastical authorities than by their violence. When the local bishop issued a cease-and-desist order, “they despised the warning of their bishop not to go forth” and “left him in the monastery under the greatest contempt.” A group of bishops sent to quell the revolt was subsequently clubbed by the nuns themselves.
In the end, the nuns suffered defeat; some were expelled for a time, but most received token punishments and settled back into a presumably less rigorous convent life.
In the medieval and early modern world, nuns lived a contemplative life in cloistered communities, but many served the poor and ran infirmaries beyond the convent walls. These active ministries ended in the Counter-Reformation when strict enclosure was enforced. But many women believed their calling to serve in the world. The Poor Clares of Toledo, in Spain, continued to minister to the poor and run an infirmary, discreetly coming and going from their convent, with the collusion of the surrounding community. In the 17th century, Mary Ward founded the Sisters of Loretto, whose nuns did not wear habits so they could circulate freely to nurse and teach. She managed to outlast the enmity of multiple popes and today is on the path to canonization.
Uncloistered religious women continue to challenge the status quo and advocate for the marginalized. The Catholic advocacy group Nuns on the Bus is a network of religious women representing various orders, who, since the 2010s, rotate traveling on a bus, crisscrossing the United States to promote social justice issues such as health care and same-sex marriage. Pope Benedict XVI accused them of having “serious doctrinal problems” and promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with Catholic faith,” charges not dissimilar to those faced by Ward.
Throughout Christian history religious women have worked collectively to resist doctrinal rigidity, episcopal attempts to constrict their ministries or appropriate their lands and increased papal scrutiny.
Acting as a community of women against a male hierarchy was risky then, as it is now. But for individual courage, it’s difficult to surpass Sister Theresa Kane. In 1979, she quietly but directly challenged Pope John Paul II by publicly advocating for the ordination of women priests during his visit to the United States. She told the pope that “the Church, in its struggle to be faithful to its call for reverence and dignity for all persons, must respond by providing the possibility of women as persons being included in all ministries of our Church.”
John Paul was known for punishing dissidents, but Kane remained a lifelong Sister of Mercy and was never admonished by the church.
How have nuns been able to resist and often succeed in their rebellions? Some of their power undoubtedly comes from the models established by their founders. Optics are also on their side: It doesn’t take much for a group of elderly women to look like victims of clerical overreach. In some cases, it is because bishops and abbots have counted too much on their obedience.
The Austrian Augustinian nuns, for instance, remain in their convent with the help of a generator and the support of the local community, proclaiming their happiness at being home, while their male Augustinian superior seems unsure what to do next. When asked to explain what motivated the three nuns to take matters into their own hands, Sister Bernadette said, “I have been obedient all my life, but it was too much.”
(Jacqueline Murray is University Professor Emerita in history at the University of Guelph in Ontario. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)