Excommunicating the Poor Clares in 2024?
I find the story of the convent of the Poor Clare Sisters of Belorado over the last few months both ludicrous and distressing. Whichever way you look at it, it is distressing for the Poor Clare Sisters. Ludicrous, as far as all the other players are concerned.
The figure of the “schismatic” bishop accompanied by his cassocked priest strikes me, more than anything else, as quaint, and the role they are playing, the objective they are pursuing, as bleak. And the figure of a real pope involved in this matter and that of a papal commissioner, the Archbishop of Burgos Mario Iceta, appointed to sort out the mess, strikes me as obsolete more than anything else. What never ceases to amaze is the fact that the Pope and his commissioner and the Catholic system, in this day and age, should first use the threat of excommunication and then solemnly apply it while feigning regret.
It is a ridiculous spectacle. Beyond time. Beyond common sense. Beyond the gospel. It lends itself very well to after-dinner entertainment on TV. Nothing more. However, there is something more: the fact that money is involved on both sides turns everything murky. The ludicrous and amazing are becoming murky.
No one has anything to gain. And, as always, women who were locked within conventual walls in the 13th century by the ecclesiastical system and subjected to clerical power in the name of Jesus, the free prophet, and in the name of Sister Clare and Brother Francis of Assisi, who wanted neither conventual walls nor a feudal Church, they, the most vulnerable, will end up being harmed the most. Let this canonical-ecclesiastical paraphernalia, which seems to be inspired by medieval stories, be brought to an end.
Let the Poor Clare Sisters of Belorado live in peace, with their choices and their doctrinal opinions, even if they seem anachronistic, absurd and mistaken to us. They are grown-up, after all. May bishops, archbishops and the pope seek only what can best guarantee the human dignity, spiritual freedom and economic livelihood of the community of these sisters, of every single one of them.
As for excommunications… what’s all this about excommunications in this day and age? What good have all those throughout history done, if not to increase the suffering of the weakest, and justify them in the name of supposed truths revealed by a supposedly supreme god? What use is the Church, the so-called Church of Jesus, the excommunicant, if it is not to alleviate suffering?
Aizarna (Basque Country), 22 June, 2024