The Poor Clare nuns of the Belorado Monastery in the Spanish region of Burgos have always been known for one thing: their mojito chocolates, sold in gourmet stores across the country and offered in Michelin-starred restaurants such as Pedro Subijana’s Akelarre, in San Sebastián. That changed on May 13.
That day, Spain awoke to a statement written by the cloistered community, announcing its formal split from the Holy See, the universal government of the Catholic Church, based in Vatican City.
Although a real-estate dispute with the Vatican was alluded to, the full reason for the Belorado Monastery’s decision wasn’t immediately clear to the press. Subsequent events only proved increasingly puzzling, as the abbess filed a lawsuit against the Archbishop of Burgos, Mario Iceta, and two spokesmen for the nuns moved into the monastery, elbowing their way into the drama.
These two spokesmen, Pablo Rojas Sánchez and his sidekick, José Ceacero, refer to themselves using the royal “we” and move about with pomp, dressed in full religious garb, looking like bishops in a naturalist 19th-century novel. Rojas Sánchez claims close ties to the late dictator Francisco Franco and calls himself a “grandee,” an aristocratic title bestowed on some Spanish nobility. Nobody knew where either of them came from, until Internet sleuths got involved. “I know this guy, he used to mix the best Gin Fizz in town,” a Bilbao native wrote on X, referring to Ceacero.
As it turns out, both men—promptly christened “the fake Bishop and the mixologist priest” by the local press—had been “ordained” by Ricardo Subirón, an excommunicated member of a Christian cult that has been linked to alleged drug trafficking and real-estate scams. (Rojas himself was also excommunicated by the Catholic Church in 2019.) Together, Rojas Sánchez and Ceacero lead something called the Devout Union of Saint Paul Apostle, a “militia” dedicated to the “war on the heretics.” In other words, they are sedevacantists.
When Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, in 1962, a breath of fresh air ran through most of the Catholic world. The Church was being updated, finding new ways to connect with people in an increasingly secularized world. Mass would not be celebrated in Latin anymore, and interfaith dialogue and religious liberty were encouraged.
But traditionalists didn’t take kindly to the newness. To them, modernism was synonymous with heresy—unity with non-Christians and non-believers “endangered” the faith, and liturgical reform diluted the Mystery (in the Catholic sense of Mystery) and the ritualistic aspect of the religion. In their eyes, all popes since John XXIII have been impostors, and the chair of the true pontiff remains vacant. (They would later adopt the title “sedevacantists,” which comes from the Latin phrase sede vacante, meaning “the chair being vacant.”)
Accurately assessing the size of the global sedevacantist movement, whose numbers could count anywhere between several tens of thousands to several hundreds of thousands, is difficult. It’s equally hard to know whether the movement has been expanding in recent years, or if it’s just becoming more vocal with the help of social media. One thing is clear, though: Pope Francis is disliked by many in the world today, but it’s not the atheists or members of other religions who hate him. It’s the Catholics.
“We have witnessed the ways in which Bergoglio [Pope Francis’s last name] has introduced modernism and Freemasonry in the Church. Jesus Christ and Muhammad are not the same. Only one of them is God,” Sister Paloma, a member of the Belorado Monastery, said during a recent TV interview. “With him, anything goes.” It’s unclear when the Belorado nuns became radicalized, but it seems likely that Rojas Sánchez and Ceacero played a pivotal role in intensifying their sedevacantist beliefs.
On June 22, the Archbishop of Burgos excommunicated 10 of the 16 schismatic nuns, making the nuns’ self-imposed schism official under canon law (exempting the oldest ones, as well as Sister María Amparo, who fled the community on the eve of the breakup). They now find themselves excluded from ecclesial protection, squatting in a monastery that belongs to the Order of Saint Clare and facing eviction. But the ex-nuns don’t seem too frazzled about it.
“We had already ceased to belong to the post-conciliar Church anyway. We turned to Pablo de Rojas Sánchez because he is a legitimate Bishop,” they said.
After being excommunicated, they took to social media to air their grievances, creating tearful reels discussing their dire financial and legal situation and accusing the “fake-news media” of slander, while Rojas Sánchez and Ceacero talked to any reporter who would listen about the “fake Vatican Council,” labeling the Church a “mafia.”
If this rhetoric rings a bell, it’s not by chance. The parallels between sedevacantism and the far right are ubiquitous. Much like the “Stop the Steal” movement, which falsely proclaimed that Biden won the 2020 election because of a widespread electoral-fraud conspiracy, sedevacantism is fragmented and disorganized, yet boisterous. Both rely on outlandish, guru-like influencers who reject—and are rejected by—institutionalism.
“Trump hasn’t absorbed it [Catholicism/members of the Catholic Church] the way he has conservative white Evangelicals … but Catholicism hasn’t been totally spared by Trumpism,” wrote theologian and Church historian Massimo Faggioli in April in Commonweal, a Catholic magazine.
Five thousand miles away from the U.S., the former nuns are proof of it. “None of you get it, because the Spanish can’t seem to get [sedevacantism] through their thick skulls,” lectured Sister Paloma to a television reporter baffled by the whole movement. “But there are so many of us around the world.” So many, in fact, that the Belorado community has been able to replace its original gurus.
After unceremoniously removing Pablo Rojas Sánchez and José Ceacero from the monastery premises on June 26 (“They liked TV cameras too much.... I haven’t blocked them on Instagram, though,” explained Sister Israel, also on TV, three weeks ago), the former Belorado nuns have brought in Rodrigo Henrique Ribeiro da Silva.
A Sorrentino-esque character dressed in over-the-top liturgical vestments, da Silva is an unrecognized Brazilian “Bishop” who has spent time in Belorado “providing spiritual assistance and educating the Sisters.” On his YouTube channel, he alludes to the Pope as a “tyrant,” and to the Archbishop of Burgos as a “Communist criminal Bergoglian altar boy.”
The nuns have also expressed admiration for Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Vatican ambassador to the United States who was excommunicated last month. A close ally of the MAGA movement and Steve Bannon (he was interviewed by Bannon on his podcast WarRoom back in 2021, spewing language that mimicked that of QAnon, and is also close with Cardinal Leo Burke, the infamous early member of Bannon’s far-right “Gladiator school”), Viganò is an anti-vaxxer, broadcasts conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” and calls Pope Francis a “servant of Satan,” while referring to Donald Trump as “one of the children of light.” “God has saved this brave warrior,” he said after the former president was shot on July 13.
How conscious the Belorado nuns are of their position as pawns in the culture wars—and of their extremely precarious situation—is unclear. After paying some of their six-figure debts, the Archbishop of Burgos recently closed their bank accounts, leaving them unable to pay employees, cocoa providers, and shipping costs for their chocolates. A PayPal crowd-funding effort proved to be a complete failure, prompting Mother Isabel, the former abbess, to take to Instagram to ask for donations.
“I want to speak to the good people. The honest, simple, truth-seeking people. The people who don’t trust the fake-news media,” she said. “This battle is far from over.”
And just as the world waits to see whether Donald Trump will be re-elected come November, those concerned with the future of the Catholic Church wonder, Will the former Belorado nuns persist in their sedevacantist journey?
Is the Pope Catholic?
Marta Represa is a writer and editorial consultant. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, System, Wallpaper*, and AnOther Magazine
