Battle of wills: Tiny order of nuns takes on Vatican

Sisters threaten to renounce vows unless superior is reinstated

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican has an unusual dilemma on its hands after nearly all the nuns in a tiny French religious order threatened to renounce their vows rather than accept the Holy See’s decision to remove their superior.

The sisters argue that the Vatican commissioners sent to replace their superior general, who is also the niece of the order’s founder, have no understanding of their way of life or spirituality. The church’s conclusion, which is contained in a summary of its investigation provided last week to The Associated Press, is that the Little Sisters of Marie, Mother of the Redeemer are living “under the tight grip” of an “authoritarian” superior and feel a “serious conflict of loyalty” toward her.

The standoff marks an extraordinary battle of wills between the Vatican hierarchy and the group of 39 nuns, most in their 60s and 70s, who run homes for the aged in rural western and southern France.

The unlikely revolt had been brewing for years but erupted in 2017, when the Vatican suspended the Little Sisters’ government and ordered the superior, Mother Marie de Saint Michel, removed. The Vatican says it took action after local church investigations in 2010 and 2016 found an excessive authoritarianism in her rule and serious problems of governance.

Details of her alleged abuses of authority haven’t been revealed. But within two years of her election as superior in 2000, six sisters had left, church officials say.

“The grave acts posed by Mother Marie de Saint Michel are denounced and the sisters are called to religious and responsible behavior,” the prefect of the Vatican’s congregation for religious, Cardinal Joao Braz di Aviz, wrote the nuns in July.

By then, Braz had already appointed a commissioner and two deputies to run the order. But the Little Sisters refused to accept them and kept Saint Michel in place in the mother house.

As the standoff escalated, 34 of the 39 nuns publicly declared last month that they had no choice but to ask to be relieved of their religious vows.

The sisters downplay problems with their superior and say the real dispute is over their local bishop’s decision to split up management of their eldercare homes that had been merged in recent years. They say the bishop used his authority to impose an unjust decision on them without taking their views or the financial implications into account.

“This is about power,” Mignot said, referring to the bishop’s authority over diocesan orders.

The sisters have appealed his decision to the Vatican’s high court “so that the truth can be re-established,” the sisters wrote their supporters.

Their cherished community was founded in 1954 in Toulouse by Marie Nault, a woman who, according to legend, possessed such spirituality that she developed the stigmata — the bleeding wounds that imitate those of Christ on the cross.